Keyword: Destiny
by Azula Always Lies
Summary: Parameters: Six years after the last episode of Invader Zim. Target: Gaz, Tak, and a whole bunch of other people who had no idea that what started with a stolen Game Slave, a shaken-up can of soda, and a showdown in an abandoned lemon factory would end up turning the universe upside-down. Keyword: Destiny.
1. Prologue: Something Weird

Well, this should be an interesting experiment. I have quite a bit planned for this story, but will anyone care? We shall see.

**Prologue: Something Weird**

_Gaz speaking_

I always knew there was something weird about her.

I mean, she was around all the time. Dib had sort of a thing for her, at first, and she was one of the few people who could actually stand him (which was weird enough on its own), so she was at our house whenever he could get her to come over. Her and her frickin' cat. I never knew anybody as attached to an animal as she was to that cat, though I guess since it wasn't really a cat, it doesn't really count.

Weird enough that she should _want_ to be around my brother, and listen when he spewed paranormal chunks at her like a kid who'd snarfed one too many sausages on Valentine's Day. Weird enough that she should be practically soldered to her cat. But what's more, I never saw her eat, or so much as pop a soda; God knows Dib was always offering, but every time it was _I don't really drink soda _or _I'm deathly allergic to chocolate _or _no thanks, I just ate, _even when he'd been mooning over her all day at school and he knew for a fact that no, she hadn't.

But hey, she might've just been anorexic, right? She might have been one of those cool kids who get those fashionable diseases in grade school, years before everybody else starts sticking their fingers down their throats. She might have been a member of a cult that didn't eat anything but nails and live mice. She might have lost a few fingers in a tragic encounter with a belt sander. It would've been better than what she really was.

Better for Dib, anyway. I didn't really care.

The weirdest thing, though, was that she seemed—_smarter_ than other people. I was only ten, but I'd already resigned myself to living in a world of morons; so long as I had a slice of pizza and my Game Slave 2, I could take or leave them as I pleased. But she was different.

She could be as stupid as the rest of them, when she was playing that part – I saw it happen more than once, how she would gauge a crowd, and the glint would vanish from her eyes like helium sucked out of a balloon – but she was sharp at the edges, almost flashing. She saw things other people were too blind to see. There seemed an uncommon depth to her thoughts.

Of course, anyone who loses to Zim must've had her brain beaten in with a cement block, so I guess she wasn't that different. Maybe she wasn't as smart as she seemed. Maybe she was too smart for her own good. In any case, I noticed her, because she was the only feature of my social landscape who wasn't as dumb as a fencepost.

And because she was around all the time. I have an extraordinarily narrow window of enthusiasm, and I like it that way – but when something gets that close to you, it becomes your business, whether you want it to or not. When it's watching your TV, and sitting on your couch, and tossing out charmingly noncommittal witticisms in a vaguely British accent when your brother makes passes at it—it's your business.

There were a good few weeks there, between when she showed up and when things went sour, but I only really spoke to her once. It was one afternoon after school, while she and Dib were monopolizing the living room – she was camped out on our couch with her cat, some stupid movie was paused on the TV screen, and he was in the kitchen making popcorn she wouldn't eat. I fixed her with a scowl.

"Can I help you?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. The cat bared its teeth and hissed.

"Yeah. You could get off my couch."

"That's not very hospitable of you." If anything, she settled further into the cushions, draping one arm over the cat's back. "You could come and hang out with us, you know. That wouldn't kill you, would it?"

"I don't want to hang out with you. I want my living room back."

She sort of sniffed. "Well. There's just no talking to you, is there?"

I glared up at her, sitting there with that smug half-smile on her face, occupying my couch like it was enemy territory (which it sort of was, even if I didn't fully know it then). She might have been smarter than other people, but in that moment, she was twice as annoying. "What are you doing here?"

She glanced at the still screen. "Watching _Intestines of War_, apparently."

"Yeah. What are you_ really_ doing here?"

The cat's eyes narrowed to red slits, its tail switching threateningly behind it. Or it was supposed to be threatening, I guess; I wasn't exactly pissing my panties. "What I'm _really_ doing," she said evenly, looking me dead in the eyes, "is relaxing on your lovely little couch, about to watch this lovely little movie with your lovely little brother."

"Dib's my older brother."

She rolled her eyes. "Whatever."

With characteristically beautiful timing, Dib wandered back into the living room carrying a bowl of popcorn, and climbed up onto the couch next to her. "What do you want, Gaz?" he said none too sweetly, frowning at me. "I told you, we're watching a movie. You can't have the TV."

"I was just leaving."

"Want some popcorn?" he asked her as I headed for the kitchen. "It's really g—aAH!" As I passed him, I grabbed the rim of the bowl and flipped it up into his face, dumping the popcorn all over his big stupid head. "Hey!" I heard him wail at my back. "What'd you do that for?"

I just snorted and tuned him out.

So she turned out to be an alien, bent on turning my planet into her poobahs' personal cookie jar. Go figure. It wasn't what I'd have guessed, but then again, I wasn't in the business of guessing. In the end, all her cleverness came to nothing, except a few hours' entertainment and a new project for Dib; she crashed and burned just like everyone else who thought being smart would get you anywhere.

And in the end, I was an instrument of her destruction, if only in a small and unexpected way. If only because, if she did slurp Earth dry like a giant Suckmonkey, there was a good chance my pizza and my Game Slave 2 wouldn't make it out intact. If only because I had nothing better to do.

Unlike her, I understand just how little intelligence actually means in the world, but sometimes I do wish people were smart enough to appreciate what I did for them that day. I mean, I _sacrificed._ I'm pretty sure that stupid robot gave me PTSD.

It might've been interesting, had she stuck around longer than she did. But I was sick of aliens. I mean, if little green bug-people were going to swarm the planet, why did they all have to land where _I_ lived? For that matter, why did they all have to go to my school? And if everything Dib was always jabbering about _was_ real, like she and Zim were, why was it only them? Why couldn't we have had some werewolves or some vampires, just to mix things up? Yeah, vampires. Vampires would've been fun.

Anyway, there were no vampires. Just frickin' aliens. One less frickin' alien, after she was gone. One less body taking up space on my couch. And one less blip of weirdness on my radar, which I guess was good.


	2. Everything That Matters

I had always wondered what the acronym for Tak/Gaz was. The only ones I ever knew for sure were ZADR and RAPR, but for the other pairings...how do you decide whose name comes first? Am I a tagger or a gator? In any case, thanks for clearing that up.

**1. Everything That Matters**

"I—I don't understand."

April had begun to sniffle, her eyes welling up with tears. I sucked on the straw of my soda. "Nothing to understand," I told her, disappointed by the dry hiss of a near-empty cup. "See you around. It's been fun."

"But—but _why_? What happened? We—w–we're so good together!"

I shrugged. "Yeah, well."

The tears overflowed and her mascara ran down her face, making her look like a melting raccoon. "What did I _do_?"

"Got boring."

"_Boring_? A–are you kidding me?" I watched in fascination as a bubble began to form at one of her nostrils, growing steadily larger while she blubbered into her drink. Low-fat, double-shot caramel latte, no foam. I should've known from the start she wouldn't last long.

"I made a _commitment_ to you! I gave up everything because of you! I—" She paused and lowered her voice, as if she were about to speak some sacred incantation. "I came out to my parents because of you!"

I snorted. "Well, if it makes you feel any better, you're probably not really a lesbian."

"Let's try again." She choked on a sob and wiped a handful of slime off her face, equal parts snot, tears and drool. "I'll be better, I promise. Can't we talk about this?"

"Actually, we can't. The Violence Channel is running a special on the headhunters of the Amazon at four, so I've really got to get home." Taking one last valiant slurp of ice and the diluted dregs of my soda, I lobbed the cup at somebody's trashcan on the curb, and half-winced when it toppled from the impact. "Have a nice life, April," I said as I turned to head home. "Or don't. I don't care."

"You said you loved me!"

Now that was one scrap of slander for which I wouldn't stand. Rolled my eyes so far back I could practically see my own brain, I shot April a pointed glance over my shoulder. "What I _said_ was, I loved the way you squealed when I went down on you," I corrected her. "But now that I think about it, that probably wasn't really _you_, so much as it was a trick you picked up rifling through Daddy's shoebox of porn discs at three AM. Hey—at least you've still got them."

I sauntered down the sidewalk in the direction of my house, popping in my earbuds to drown out the sound of April moaning my name. Finding something loud and screamy on my iPod, I produced my Game Slave 6 from my backpack, and mowed down shark-pig hybrids with an AK-47 the whole walk home.

It wasn't that I was a lesbian, exactly. I mean, maybe I was. Maybe I wasn't. But I wasn't overly concerned with labels, and finding something to call myself took a back seat to doing what I wanted to do; sure, I went through girlfriends like Dib went through dumb ideas, but I felt no desire to plaster my backpack in rainbow buttons or campaign for marriage equality. Actually, when I considered it, the idea of_ marrying_ any of the girls I'd fooled around with kind of turned my stomach.

They were just flavors of the week. It'd been that way for three years – ever since I hit thirteen, and realized girls were more fun to play with than boys. But they always got boring, after awhile, so I cut them loose and went back on the prowl. Not that I ever really actively hunted, so much as I just lay back and let them come to me like metal filings to a magnet.

It was a good arrangement: they were looking for some excitement, a shot at rebellion, a little curry to spice up the lifetime of rice staring them in the face. I was looking for something to do when there was nothing good on TV. We filled each other's needs for a few weeks – a month for the real keepers – and when I tired of their taste, I spit them out.

Besides, someone in our family had to get girls. As ever, Dad was too wrapped up in his research to notice his horde of fangirls, and the last girl who'd looked at Dib any way other than sideways was a lizard monster from Space England. If I didn't rake in the pussy, who would?

When I got home, I kicked off my shoes, wriggled out of my tights, grabbed a soda from the fridge and flopped down on the couch, flipping on the TV. A few seconds later, I heard the stairs creak, and Dib slid onto the couch beside me. "No April today?" he said.

"No April ever. Kicked her to the curb."

"Wow. You really are a heartless jerk."

I sneered at him. "Make any progress with Zim?"

He just sort of huffed and opened his laptop, cowed as a dog spritzed with a mister (or, more applicably, an Irken sprayed with soda). With every year that passed – and every plan that failed to bear fruit – it became easier and easier to play that card and shut him up. When we were kids, the little war he was waging had been funny; after six years, it was just sad.

The headhunters special broke for commercial, and a spate of familiar theme music burst from the TV speakers. "Hey kids!" shouted the voice inside the Bloaty suit, a new guy since the old one had a coronary two years ago. On the opposite end of the spectrum from his predecessor, this one was rail-thin, and the suit hung in greasy folds around him, flapping when he moved. "Come on down to Bloaty's Pizza Hog and put our pizza in your face! We make it just for you! You love it! YOU LOVE IT SO MUCH!

"And make sure to come out this Friday for the premiere of our new Milkshake Pizza, 'cause it's the last new pizza we ever gonna have! That's right, kids! Bloaty's Pizza Hog is closing down! No more pizza for you! But don't worry—you can still come and see your good friend Bloaty, down the block in the unemployment line! Or on the street, passed out in a gutter! Bloaty's rent is due next week!"

The man in the suit had become hysterical, but I had checked out after "closing down." Having gone catatonic for a few seconds, I snapped back to find my only-half-emptied soda can crushed in my fist, spilling over onto my skirt and the floor. "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" I roared, nearly shaking the foundation of the house. "They're _closing Bloaty's_? How dare they do this to me?! They _will pay_!"

Dib shook his head. "It's just pizza."

"_Just pizza_?" I flung the crumpled can at him hard enough to knock him half-over the arm of the couch. "That pizza was my first solid food! It's my only reason to _live!_"

"That pizza is cardboard and melted plastic. It would've been the reason you died." Straightening himself, he frowned at me. "Besides, Bloaty's is for kids. I can't believe you've been going there this long."

"Yeah, well, I can't believe you're seventeen and still a virgin. So shut up already!"

He sighed and I stewed, well aware that no one else could comprehend how catastrophic this really was. _Closing Bloaty's, _I growled to myself, chewing the words like a particularly nasty bit of gristle on a steak._ How can they be closing Bloaty's? I ought to be keeping them in business all by myself! _

"You know," Dib tried again after a minute, "you could go somewhere else."

"I might as well go to Mars," I grumbled. "And we don't even know where it is."

He raised his eyebrows. Before he opened his mouth again, I knew what he was going to say. "We could, if you'd show me what you did that time to make Tak's ship fly."

"I don't even remember what I did," I lied. "That was six years ago. Would you quit harping on it?"

"Well, it's just that—"

"Look, Dib," I snapped, "I've got more important things to worry about than the fact that you're still too stupid to do something I figured out when I was ten. My life is _falling apart_ here, and all you care about is that broken-down hunk of space crap in the garage? Why are you always so SELFISH?!"

Chucking the remote at the TV, I stormed up the stairs to my room, slammed the door behind me, and fumed for the remainder of the day. Actually, all that day, and all through the night, and into the next morning at breakfast, when my toast got stuck in the toaster and I banged it against the counter so hard I broke it.

I seethed through the walk to school and sulked in my classes, answering anything I was asked with a snarl and a scowl. At lunch, I mauled my mystery meat until it was even less recognizable that it had been before. For what was probably the first time since the first edition went on the market, I didn't even pull out my Game Slave, the pangs of injustice too sharp for even a few rounds against the Cyborg Zombie Hog to cure.

So could you really blame me, if I wasn't at the top of my game? If I wasn't as vigilant as I might've been? Could you really say it was my fault, if I was hunkered on a bench in the courtyard during my free period, compiling a mental list of one hundred and one ways to wreak my horrible vengeance on the corporate swine responsible for shutting down Bloaty's, and too wrapped up in that to notice before it was too late? If all I saw was the briefest flash of silver, at my feet where I'd dumped my backpack, and assumed it must've been a squirrel?

The correct answer is, no. No, you couldn't. I was in _mourning_. It wasn't my fault.

I didn't realize what had happened until I got home, when I deposited myself on the couch, flipped on the TV, and discovered that there was nothing on worth poisoning my eyeballs with that day. So I went for my Game Slave. But, having rifled through my backpack once, I found nothing; dumping its contents on the couch, I saw only binders and textbooks, and that was when I started to freak.

"DIB!" I hollered. "What did you do with my Game Slave?!"

"Nothing!"

He was in the kitchen, about to nuke a carton of leftover Chinese. I grabbed him by the neck and slammed him against the wall, getting a lot closer to his loser face than I'd ever wanted to be. "Are you sure?" I growled.

"Yes, I'm sure! I never touched it!"

I glared at him a minute longer before releasing my grip, watching his face turn blue. Finally, I threw him against the opposite wall, then stalked out of the kitchen, wondering if everything that mattered really was slipping out from under me – or if I was just going as crazy as he was.

I turned my room upside down. Nothing. Then I did the same to Dib's room, for good measure, and Dad's lab, and the rest of the house; it was as if my Game Slave had vanished into thin air. Before I could formulate a plan – when I was just standing in my room, fists clenched at my sides, trying to decide whether I should kill myself or someone else – my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

_Want the toy back?_

Underneath that was an address I recognized as an artificial lemon factory, in the abandoned industrial district a few miles out of town. There were no other details – the source of the message had been scrambled, and it wouldn't let me text back – but that was enough for me. Any lead was better than nothing.

When Dib had turned sixteen, Dad had bought him a car, in the hope that it would finally get him out of his alien autoshop in the garage. Of course, it was a miserable failure, but I was more than happy to take advantage of the situation; the industrial district was too far to walk, so I swiped his keys and took off.

I didn't let myself speculate as to what any of it was about – I didn't ask myself who it was, or what they could possibly want, or why I had to drive all the way out here. I didn't give even a moment's thought to my free period in the courtyard. I just focused on retrieving my Game Slave, and getting my life back on track.

I skidded to a stop halfway down the main drag that divided the district, where the rest of the road was blocked off by the wreckage of a crumbling warehouse. Cutting off the engine, I hoisted my backpack over one shoulder – heavy with an assortment of hastily-chosen implements for teaching whoever-this-was why nobody messed with my Game Slave – and began weaving through a labyrinth of boarded-up buildings, rubble crunching under my feet.

Once, before I was born, this place was a thriving hub of production, churning out doorknobs and lightbulbs and chicken-fried steaks faster than the trucks could ferry them away. Then, the economy dipped, and another factory's neon sign went dark every day. The line workers got the hell out of Dodge and the owners all went bankrupt, and nobody'd had enough time, money or faith to invest to get anything out here up and running again; mine were the first footprints to cut through this dust in more than a decade. All around me, I could smell the decay.

A grey-brick building emblazoned with a giant lemon, the paint faded to little more than a silhouette, loomed above me. The wall where the doors would've been had caved in, so I slipped inside through a crack in one wall, blinking until my eyes adjusted to the near-darkness inside.

"Hey!" I shouted, hearing rats scatter at the sudden sound. "Anybody here?"

From somewhere above me – far above me, at least a couple of floors – I heard a vaguely metallic _shlick, _like the sound a retractable cord makes when you pop it out of a console. It wasn't exactly an answer, but I took it.

There was a skeleton of a spiral staircase against one wall, its railing listing to one side and just about every other step missing, the upper floors peering through the floorboards that had rotted around it. I followed it up one floor, then another, then a third; on the fourth floor, I paused. I might've imagined it, but I thought I saw a glimmer of color amid all of the grey, if only for a second. I thought maybe it was purple.

I stepped off of the landing into a cavernous crap heap, cluttered with rusting conveyor belts, towering metal racks, and machines spewing springs and gears. A single shaft of light spilled in through a hole in the ceiling the size of my fist.

"I know you're up here." I clutched the strap of my backpack a little tighter, sweeping my gaze from one corner of the room to the other. "Listen, if you're gonna make me come all the way out here, you better at least show your face."

All of a sudden – out of nowhere – a ribbon of silver shot through the air towards me, in half the time it took me to turn and see it. Before I knew it, I was held aloft, my arms pinned to my sides and my back pinned to the wall by something heavy, cold, and quickly constricting – a thick, steel-plated cable, now trembling taut in the air. I squinted as its source emerged from the shadows, and strode slowly across the room.

"Hey, wow. Tak. Long time no see."

I'd only seen her as she really was briefly before, on the disc and for half a second at the hotdog stand, but I got the impression she'd looked better then than she did now. Standing there, illuminated by that one stray sunbeam, scowling at me like _I _was the one who'd stolen _her _most prized possession, she struck me as sallow – a distinctly pale, sickly green, like the unripe guts of a kiwi.

Or maybe the barf of somebody who'd eaten too much unripe kiwi. The thing she was wearing, whatever it was, had obviously been torn and mended about a thousand times over, and her left antenna was twisted at a really unpleasant-looking angle.

But her eyes, ringed in grey though they were, burned bright as ever. She was angry at me. _Why would she be angry at me?_

I decided to take a nice light tack for the specific purpose of frustrating her, since she'd already frustrated me quite a bit. "What've you been up to all this time?" I said when she was a few feet away from me, and had risen to my eye level on a pair of limbs that sprouted from her back below the cable.

"Be silent." She didn't raise her voice, though the fury on her face suggested she'd have liked to. "I'm going to tell you a few things, and you're going to listen," she said with a quiet but undisguised hatred, tightening the cable around my chest. "Okay?"

"Fine, but I think you're confused. Shouldn't you be giving this speech to my brother, or Zim?"

"I SAID BE SILENT!" she screamed. Talk about a short fuse. "I have my reasons for choosing you, ignorant child. You'll hear them, if I decide to let you live that long."

Before I could fire off a comeback, she crushed the breath from my lungs, so that all I could do was sputter and glare daggers at her until she loosened her grip. A bitter smile curled her lips and flashed her teeth, too sharp to be those of a human, too blunt to be called fangs.

"Did you know," she said, "that much as a SIR unit's memory disc can be used as a remote control, it can also be remotely read? Not _accessed_, unfortunately – not edited, nor controlled – but read, so that the unit sees and recalls not only what is or was directly in front of it, but all events taking place within range of the disc. The unit—" her gaze flickered over her shoulder, and for the first time I noticed the robot in one corner of the room "—_and_ its operator.

"I'm not giving this _speech _to Zim or your brother because it's become clear to me that neither of them ever posed a threat. No doubt Zim thinks he defeated me, but he and his pathetic excuse for a cruiser would be a chunk of compacted space rubbish if it weren't for you. _You_ were the one who hacked Mimi, and she was the reason I lost control."

The robot's round eyes halved themselves, drooping with what I could only describe as a very convincing affectation of guilt. But Tak didn't look at it again. "_You_ are the reason my escape pod crashed in a jungle halfway across the planet from here. _You_ are the reason I spent a year dropping in and out of consciousness, in so much pain I could barely see straight, with nothing but the most basic medical supplies to keep me from decomposing in the dirt.

"Because of you, I've had to survive the past six years broken and stranded, practically starving, and crawl across your stinking planet through sewers and in cargo holds. I'm reduced to hiding out in places like this, because I've lost my holoprojectors. I have to ration the fuel left in my pak, because I've got no means of refilling it, and my other provisions went down with my ship. I came to Earth to make right what never should have gone wrong, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing but bones that will never set quite right, and a shell of what I used to be.

"This time, it _is_ about revenge. I'll never make it off this filthy rock. Not without my ship. My fuel cell will drain and I'll die, here on this disgusting dirt clod, a trillion miles from home – but if my life is really going to end this way, someone's going to pay for it. You, little girl. This is all—because of _you_."

When she'd spat the last of her sob story, she just stared at me, eyes narrow, jaw set. I wondered what she was expecting. "So are you going to give me back my Game Slave or what?"

She let out a strangled shriek, a few notes too shrill to be a snarl, and whipped her head towards the robot. "Mimi!" she all but howled, bringing it zipping to her side. I saw that in its claw, it clutched a Game Slave 6 with a shiny skull sticker slapped on the back – the same one that had gone missing from my backpack in the courtyard. "Dispose of the child's plaything."

The talons of the robot's claw snapped shut in half a blink of an eye, and the _crunch _of metal and plastic assaulted my ears. Wide-eyed, I watched as it dropped the mangled remains of my Game Slave, its claw jerking upwards in a salute.

"Well done," Tak purred as the robot returned to its corner. The limbs on which she rose make that _shlick_ing sound I'd heard before, as they extended and she drew closer to me. "That'll be you in a moment, child. What do you think of that?"

"I think you just fucked with the wrong girl."

Goddamn robot. I could be fast, too. Yanking an arm free of the cable, I plunged my hand into a side pocket on my backpack, pulled out a soda (who _doesn't_ carry a spare can on them at all times?), shook it up, and sprayed it all over Tak and the ladybug-looking thing on her back. She went up in a shower of smoke and sparks, yowling; the cable shuddered once and reeled back into its port.

"MIMI!" Tak screeched as I bolted for the staircase. "Don't let her get away!"

The robot's claw shot out on its cord, and this time, I heard it before I saw it. I dodged at the last second and the claw hurtled into a rod from the staircase's rail, shattering the already-crumbling wood. Before it could retract, I leapt onto the claw as if it were the footbar on a pogo stick, and my weight sent it plummeting through the rotted floorboards; the cord hissed like a zipper as I rode it down to the first floor. When I hopped off, it snapped back and I ditched the factory, twirling the car keys in one hand.

I had them in the ignition before I saw the robot again, clearing a hill of debris. Again, the claw flew towards me, and caught the front bumper of the car. I gritted my teeth, revved the engine, and slammed the gearshift into reverse, then back into drive, whirling through a half-doughnut that made the tires scream; as I blazed down the road back to the city, I could feel them crush the cord like a tube of toothpaste.

And when I swung into the driveway, I found the robot's claw still latched onto the bumper, a few feet of its cord still spitting sparks. I peeled back the talons and tossed it into the trash.

Frickin' aliens.


	3. An Eye For an Eye

**2. An Eye for an Eye**

She would be back. If she really blamed me for her sorry state, she'd be back. I knew enough about revenge to know the desire didn't die so easily.

What I didn't know was how, or when, or where. She'd blown her only shot. She couldn't leave the industrial district, and I sure as hell wasn't going there again; besides, she had nothing left to bait me with. I felt sure that this wasn't over – not by a long shot – but it also seemed I was holding all the cards.

Okay, so she broke my Game Slave. That was the number one thing.

I could've just forgotten about her. Left her to waste away on the fourth floor of that old lemon factory, until her robot began to rust along with the rest of the machinery, until she was nothing but a skeleton that somebody would find when they finally revamped the place and maybe think _weird, these don't look like human bones _before they swept her away with the cobwebs and the dust. Let that be her penance for screwing with me.

But the thought was less than satisfying. For one thing, she already knew it was coming. For another thing, I wouldn't be inflicting it myself; I'd just be slumped on the couch, watching hobo cage fights on The Violence Channel until my eyeballs bled, wishing I had my Game Slave or at least that I'd broken a few fingers to pay for it. I mean, I always figured that was the boring part about being royalty, right? You got to sit up on your throne and shout "off with his head" right and left, but you were never the one wielding the axe.

I could've traded her misery for Dib's, and told her he had her ship. I'd get rid of her that way for sure. But there was no vengeance in it, and as much as I tended to relish Dib's pain, he hadn't done anything recently to make me need to hear him howl. Besides, that might actually qualify as being _nice_ to her, and I wasn't in the business of being nice.

I could've gone back out there with a twelve-pack of soda and a chainsaw, and squeezed myself a nice cool glass of alien guts. It wouldn't be too hard. She would have deserved it, and I wouldn't have felt bad about it – at least, I told myself I wouldn't.

I didn't actually know. I'd never needed to destroy anyone so thoroughly as all that. Usually, when I got it into my head to get revenge, the victim in question was like a red-and-white striped target: there were a lot of larger rings circling the bullseye, nonvital points I could strike. I could hurt someone without obliterating them, and usually, that was enough.

But Tak was all bullseye now. Other than her life, there was nothing I could take from her that she hadn't already lost, and I wasn't sure I really wanted to _kill _her. Maybe I was a heartless jerk, but I wasn't a _murderer – _not in cold blood, anyway. It squicked me out to think about just straight-up crushing her like I'd crushed the robot's claw-cord, even if I knew I could.

So what was there to do? Nothing but think. Nothing but wait.

Two nights after my foray into the industrial district, I woke suddenly for no reason I could place, the clock by my bed reading four AM. Years of living with Dib – Dib scattering thermometers to check for cold spots, Dib dusting my windowsill for chupacabra footprints, Dib summoning demons to curse me with pigmouth – had taught me to know instinctively when someone else was in my room, and that night, I was instantly on guard.

It didn't take me long to see them. A pair of purple eyes, locked on me from across the room, almost glowing in the darkness. A cable cut through the air and my arm shot up to catch it; with it twined around my forearm, I dragged her out of the shadows to the edge of my bed, the heels of her boots digging into my carpet, the anger in her eyes redoubling with every inch.

"Brave girl," I said with a grin, becoming increasingly aware that not taking her seriously was the best button I could push. "Not all humans are the best night drivers, you know. It's a good thing nobody mistook you for a little iguana crawling down the street; you could be roadkill right about now."

The cable retracted with a _snap_. "I never did anything to you," she growled, half to herself, half to me. "I never had it out for you. Why are you always ruining everything?"

"You mean your robot's claw? It's in the trash if you want it. Hey, lucky cat's paw, right?"

She looked as if she'd have liked to sink those almost-fangs into my throat. "Just one more reason to end your pitiful life."

"Right. You're still on about revenge, huh?"

"Irken code of honor. As humans would say, an eye for an eye."

I snorted. "You lost to Zim. Aren't you a little beyond _honor_?"

In an explosion of silver and red, what seemed a thousand different horrific implements sprouted from the armory on her back – five hundred lasers trained on my forehead, five hundred blades aimed at my heart. In the same second, I snapped the fingers of my free hand, and a ring of red lights wreathed my room. My security plushies' eyes flickered on as their defenses deployed, accompanied by a flourish of canned cackling.

She glanced around and spat something in a language I didn't understand, eyes thinning to violet slits. I smiled. "We can do this all night, babe."

I watched her process the situation, frustration mounting inside of her until she nearly burst at her seams. Finally, she withdrew her weaponry, and backed away from my bed. "You think you're so clever, child," she hissed, then skittered out my window, the bob of her wonky antenna the last thing I saw before she disappeared.

I was almost glad she did what she did to my Game Slave. If she hadn't, I might've actually felt sorry for her.

She tried again. I got texts and e-mails from scrambled or fake sources, trying to lure me to the outskirts of town on false pretenses; I rolled my eyes and hit "delete." I'd be hanging in the courtyard during free period and catch glimpses of silver in the brush, the telltale glint of the robot's red eyes; it was gone within a few shakes of a soda can.

I would find suspicious little tokens in my room, spherical widgets that beeped and blinked from inside my desk drawers or under my mattress, engraved with the same symbol I'd seen on her ship. I scooped them up, dunked them in the sink, and programmed my dolls to fry intruders on sight.

Weeks went by. I tried to buy a new Game Slave, only to find out that the Game Slave 6 had been discontinued in anticipation of the release of the Game Slave 7 in the spring (spring being, at best, an excruciating three months away). I watched reruns of _The Real World: Transylvania_ on The Vampire Network. I picked up a new girl, Zara – one of those poser goth types, strutting around like the star of the show in black tutus and spiked dog collars, but her Hot Topic lipstick was sweet all the same – and she proved pretty good at distracting me, especially once she got her tongue pierced.

One Friday night, we'd nuked some popcorn and popped in a movie – _Intestines of_ _War 5:_ _Revenge of the Cyborg Dinosaurs _– and were curled up on the couch, the living room lights dimmed. I had just unhooked Zara's bra when I heard the noise – first a_ zap_, then a crash, from a direction that was unmistakably my room.

I groaned. "Be back in a second," I said as I heaved myself off of the couch, and without bothering to pause the movie, tromped up the stairs.

When I opened my door, who should I see but that frickin' robot, perched wide-eyed on my windowsill? From the smoking laser-burns speckling my bedspread, I deduced that it had dodged the blasts from my dolls, and frowned as it turned to dart out the window.

"No you don't, little alley cat," I snarled under my breath. Grabbing a stone statuette of a zombie unicorn from where it sat on my desk, I flung it at the back of the robot's head, and it connected – nearly punched a hole through to the other side, when it hit with a force that made the robot's red eyes go grey. It wobbled, sparked, and tumbled with a _clang_ to my bed, the statuette still lodged in the back of its head.

"This has gone on long enough. Let's see how Tak likes me disposing of her _plaything_."

I extracted the statuette to find a dent crescenting the robot's head, making it look like a half-eaten apple. Plunking its unmoving shell on a shelf above my bed, I slammed the door shut behind me and went back downstairs to Zara and our movie, just in time to see a T-rex waste a barracks with its laser eyes.

I finished with Zara before the movie ended and sent her home, feeling no need nor desire to see her in my bed the next morning (and knowing that, in any case, her presence there would make the night's events both intolerably awkward and unfathomably complicated). Then, I got ready for bed, slid under my covers, and waited.

That night, she didn't waste time watching me. No sooner did the tapered tips of her ladybug-legs (well, spider-legs, really, but that thing on her back still reminded me of a ladybug) pry open my window than they unfurled towards the robot's shell, and I snapped my fingers beneath the blanket; at my signal, the plushies flanking the robot woke in defense mode, seizing its limp arms in their claws.

To her credit, she didn't play tug-of-war with them, though it would've been amusing to see her try. Instead, she vaulted in through the window and turned the silvery limbs on me, looming above me, seething. "You'll return my property if you know what's good for you, child."

"Uh-huh. Are we really going to do this again?"

Another snap of my fingers and a bean-filled purple gorilla lumbered over to my bed, slinging one arm around her waist (or what waist she had, anyway – the more often I saw her, the more I found it funny that she hadn't changed in six years, what with me so much taller and a considerably different shape) and shoving a fist up against her neck. From its knuckles, a row of razor sharp, Wolverine-style claws extended, glistening in the moonlight.

"Give her back," Tak spat in the gorilla's grip, the limbs returning to their ports like snakes slinking back to their burrows. "She's mine."

"What happened to the Irken code of honor? An eye for an eye. A toy for a toy."

I could see the muscles in her face working, twitching as if to restrain an outburst. "Mimi is more than a toy. Give her back!"

"_Mimi_ is a hunk of metal and circuitry, just like my Game Slave. I'll give her back if you give me one good reason why I should."

She squeezed her eyes shut a moment, and I found myself studying her. Watching her chest flutter in quick spasms of breath, her hands ball into fierce, useless fists. Like it always seemed to these days, my gaze drifted to her twisted antenna; for half a second, I felt a disturbing urge to reach out and straighten it myself. I wondered how it would feel between my fingers – if it could be bent back into place, like a pipe cleaner, or if it had to be set like a broken bone. If it hurt.

"You ruined _everything_," she said when she opened her eyes, her voice nearly a whisper. "I had a second chance, and you crushed it. I die a little more every day because of you. What would you have me do?"

"I could ask you the same thing." I leveled my gaze with hers. "You were going to wipe out my entire race. What would you have done? Sat back and let it happen?"

"I would have kept my filthy human nose out of the affairs of superior beings," she snapped.

"Funny. You don't look so superior right now."

To that, she said nothing. Just glared at me, silently steaming, coursing with an energy for which there was no outlet. It was an expression I recognized, having seen it stamped across the faces of my more rebellious flings – those girls who were always pissed off at everything, at their parents, at their friends, at society, full of this huge directionless anger that melted with their eyeliner once I got to work with my vibrator.

I wondered, briefly, horrifically, if she would swallow that cure as easily as they did. If I could slip my hand under her skirt and turn that fire inside to a better purpose, put a nice big crack in her pretty voice.

To distract myself from that incredibly weird thought, I glanced up at the robot, my fingers poised to snap. "So. An eye for an eye, right?"

"NO!" she cried, so loud I actually flinched. "_Please_ don't hurt Mimi! She's—all I've got left!"

I could have – could have, would have, should have – done it anyway. Should've had my dolls roast the robot right then. Maybe toss it to the stuffed lion with the car-crusher jaws. I could've had the gorilla cut her throat right then and there, and watched her bleed out on my bed.

But who knew how hard that'd be to wash out of my blanket?

"You're pathetic."

Rolling my eyes, I craned up to the shelf, grabbed the robot by one leg, and threw it at her. Then, I nodded to the gorilla, and it chucked them both out the open window – Tak, and the robot in her arms.


	4. Irken Fun Dip

Not exactly. ;)

**3. Irken Fun Dip**

"Dad?" Poking my head down the staircase to the lab, I saw light through the crack under the door, and yelled again as I descended the stairs. "DAD!"

"Dad's not here." I opened the door to find Dib bent over one of his worktables, squinting at something through a microscope, decked out in goggles and rubber gloves. He straightened up and turned to look at me, pushing the goggles up onto his forehead. "He went to some conference thing, remember?"

I frowned. "Obviously not."

"Well, why do you care?"

"Just wanted to see if I could get a few bucks out of him. I was thinking of taking Zara to that swanky Italian joint for dinner."

"Is it your two-day anniversary already?"

"Two weeks, actually."

He rolled his eyes and gestured with a little white stick in one hand, lifting it like a glass of wine. "Here's to another two."

As he returned to the microscope, fiddling with a bunch of little wheels that studded the sides, I ambled over to glance over his shoulder. "What's that thing?" I asked, meaning the white stick, which he had placed on a glass plate and slid under the microscope. Upon inspection, I saw that it was chalky-looking and rounded at the ends, no bigger than one of my fingers. "And why do you care?"

"I found this on my last information-gathering mission at Zim's house. That thing—" he pointed to a small container in a plastic bag on the countertop, made up of interlocking red and purple segments "—goes with it. It's some kind of Irken food." The dials on the microscope squeaked as he turned them up further, practically squeezing one eyeball through his goggles into the lens. "I've seen him with it before. The little container is filled with powder, and you're supposed to dip the stick in it and eat it."

"So it's alien Fun Dip."

"Well, sure, you could simplify it like that. But we've got to think bigger than candy, Gaz!" He grabbed a tablet from a nearby drawer, switched it on, and began making frantic notes, gloved fingertips flying across the touchscreen. "If I can break this down and find out what it's made of, maybe I could reverse-engineer a—hey! Don't touch that!"

Ignoring Dib's protests, I unzipped the plastic bag and opened the container, to find that each side's contents corresponded to its color. After a moment's consideration, I licked my index finger, stuck it into the side full of purple powder, and sucked it clean in my mouth.

"_God!_" Sputtering and choking, I spat the stuff into my hand the second I tasted it, and proceeded to wipe it off on Dib's jacket. "That shit's disgusting! It tastes like frickin' rubbing alcohol!"

"That's why _you_ weren't supposed to taste it! Seriously, Gaz—"

"Maybe you should leave Zim alone. He's got enough problems if this is all he has to eat." That was when I had a thought. Were these the kinds of provisions Tak had lost? "Hey, let me borrow this, okay?" I said, snatching the little stick out from under the microscope and sealing it up with the powder. "Thanks."

Before he could grab the bag back, I was bounding up the stairs, leaving Dib yelling up at me from the lab. I went upstairs and changed into a little number just slutty enough to raise eyebrows, not enough to get me kicked out of anywhere classy, lined my eyes with a black pencil (as if I needed to), slid on a few coats of devil's-dick-red lipstick, and dropped the plastic bag into a leather clutch, along with a handful of cash I swiped from Dib's nightstand because, you know, why not?

At the restaurant, Zara and I ate linguine in clam sauce and ordered cocktails with our fake IDs, her rhapsodizing about love and socialism and me staring at her cleavage in her too-tight tube dress. I drove her home and we popped off a quickie in her driveway, though she whined the whole time about how her parents weren't home and we'd have had the house to ourselves and if I'd only come in, just for a little while, there'd be rose petals and champagne and…I don't know, I wasn't really listening.

Once her panties were safely tugged up over her ass, I kicked her out of the car and pealed out of her neighborhood – but not before having her run inside real quick, and grab me a can of soda for the road. Not that I drank it. Instead, I stowed it in the clutch, well aware that in situations like these, one could never have too much insurance.

The industrial district was different at night. Not as ugly. Shadows washed the wreckage and softened its edges, hid the crumbling brick of the buildings in silhouette, turned the runoff in the alleyways watercolor blue and green. The lemon factory loomed on the horizon, what remained of its logo shining yellow in the moonlight. Inside, it was silent as the grave.

Unable to preserve the silence (those stairs, decrepit as they were, creaked like crazy), I reached the fourth floor to find her waiting for me, reared up on her spider-legs, the arsenal on her back poised to attack. A laser beam actually zipped past my head (_just_ past, mind you; another quarter of a centimeter, a second slower on the sidestep, and I'd have been Swiss cheese) before I unsheathed my soda can, warding her off.

Her eyes narrowed and she recoiled, metal limbs clicking as she backed onto the factory floor. "Why are you here?" she demanded.

"You should be nice to me," I said. "I have a present for you."

Now _that _dumbfounded her, though she recovered with, unsurprisingly, more anger. "What?" she barked.

"Are you deaf? I said I have a present for you. Come over here in the light with me and I'll show you what it is."

Without further ceremony, I strolled over to the far wall, where the light from the hole in the ceiling streamed in cool and bright. I sat down against it and motioned for her to join me, taking note of the robot's red eyes peering out at us both from between the bars of a rolling rack.

Tak exchanged a glance with it, saying something without words, then retracted her spider-legs and did as I'd asked – approached me, not cautiously, but deliberately deliberate, if that makes sense. As if she were trying her best _not_ to be guarded, for fear it would make her seem weak.

She didn't sit, at first. Just stood there with her arms crossed, about a foot away from me, and I had to crack a smirk; she was taller standing up than I was sitting down, but not by much. "_What_?" she said again.

"You seem a lot smaller than you did when I was a kid. It's kind of hilarious."

"You've grown. I haven't. I fail to see the humor in that."

"Well, you would, wouldn't you?" I opened my clutch, produced Dib's plastic bag, and unzipped it, holding its contents up to the light. "This wouldn't happen to be familiar to you, would it?"

Her eyes widened into violet discs, her arms going limp at her sides. "Where did you get that?"

"Dib swiped it from Zim, and I swiped it from Dib. He says it's some kind of Irken food, but to me at least, it tastes like fried ass. Do you actually eat this stuff?"

"Yes. It's meant to be a snack."

"You guys are pretty big on snacks, aren't you?"

"Yes," she said, completely deadpan.

I offered it to her. "You want this, then?"

She blinked and almost reached out, then stopped herself, stepping back. Folding her arms across her chest, she avoided my eyes. "I don't accept charity, child," she said, in as lofty a tone as I suspected she could manage. "Especially not from humans, and especially _especially _not from _you._"

"It's not charity. It's screwing up another one of Dib's stupid plans. And who doesn't like screwing up Dib's plans?"

She eyed me skeptically for a moment, biting down on her lower lip. At length, she snatched the container from my hand, and situated herself against the wall beside me; I watched as she opened the container and removed the white stick Dib had been examining, licking it to wet it. Her tongue, I noticed, was raspberry-red, and came to a finer point than mine – like a snake's tongue, minus the fork. I found myself thinking about Zara and her little silver barbell, and how April had always tasted of licorice. I wondered what she would taste like.

When she slid the stick into her mouth, coated in that purple dust that even smelled like death warmed over, she closed her eyes. I could see a shiver of pleasure course through her, from the tips of her antennae to her feet in her tattered shoes. As repulsive as the stuff was, she obviously enjoyed it, and I didn't think it was just because she hadn't eaten in six years – though that was fairly amazing on its own.

Even if she was sucking what amounted to biological gasoline out of the ladybug on her back, it would still be beyond weird not to eat at all, to forget how it felt to put food in your mouth and swallow it. I was still having nightmares about Bloaty's shutting down; I couldn't imagine never eating _anything._

The longer I watched her, just sitting there dipping the stick and sucking it clean, the more my fingers itched. I battled the urge for awhile, but eventually, I leaned over and straightened her wonky antenna, untangling it in one quick tug. She yowled like a cat and slapped my hand away, the container tumbling into her lap as her eyes snapped open in a glare.

"What was that for?" she said, her voice a wounded snarl, her hand rising to rub the base of her left antenna.

"Wasn't it bothering you? It was bothering me."

"Well, that _hurt_!" she snapped, flinging the container and what was left in it at my head. "Why do you think I never messed with it all this time?"

"Sure, but it's over now, right? And you don't look so weird anymore."

She didn't answer, just sat sulking and stroking the offended antenna, refusing to look at me. After awhile, she left it alone, and drew her legs slowly to her chest; she wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees, staring at nothing I could see. I recognized the clouds creeping into her eyes, from years of watching them hang around Dib. The look she wore, in that moment, was a look of defeat.

"So I suppose I've lost," she said, with none of the fire I'd grown used to hearing in her voice.

"I suppose you have."

She sighed. "I have to commend you, child. You were a worthier opponent than I had imagined."

"I know."


	5. Planetarium

I don't actually know what that thing on Tak's head is, officially, but for the purposes of this story, I guessed that it had something to do with her little mind-control trick and designated it accordingly.

**4. Planetarium**

Don't ask me how it happened. Don't ask me why I kept going out there, even when it defied all logic; don't ask me why, when we had a freezer full of microwave pizzas, The Violence Channel was running all-day marathons of _Monster Trucks Versus Kittens, _and a leather-dipped Zara was lolling on my couch just waiting to be unwrapped, I managed to end up in the industrial district making antagonistic conversation with a marooned alien. I didn't understand it myself.

All I knew was, Zara was becoming unconscionably boring, and Tak inconceivably interesting. The former was easy enough to explain. After a few weeks, I'd seen all of Zara's tricks and could anticipate all her reactions; we seemed to repeat the same conversations, go on the same dates, and have the same sex day after day. Having been through it countless times with countless other girls, I could identify the Groundhog Day stage in our relationship: the point at which every day I spent with her felt exactly the same as the one before.

The latter was harder. It wasn't as if my experiences with Tak were any less predictable than my experiences with Zara. In fact, I could practically write down a schedule, an itinerary of events that always occurred in no specific order whenever I showed up at the factory.

It went like this: argue with her, listen to her yell at me about something, figure out where the robot had perched to glare at me, enjoy some awkward silence, make a joke she didn't appreciate, say something that offended her, have something thrown at me, dodge a couple of lasers, have some inappropriate thoughts about her, argue with her some more, learn some Irken curse words, leave pissed off and vowing never to come back. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But as frustrating as she was, I never got tired of her. Maybe I wanted in because she didn't want to let me in, because she actually posed a challenge – because she was the locked room to my girlfriends' revolving doors.

Maybe it was because there was more to know about her than there was to know about someone like Zara or April, two-dimensional star charts where she was a planetarium, and I sensed her well of surprises ran much deeper than theirs. Maybe it was because I still knew she was the smartest person I was ever going to meet, even if she was too bitter to let it show much.

In any case, it was useless to mull over the _why_ or the _how_, because the fact was that it happened. I kept going out there, even when it defied all logic. I liked looking at her (she was certainly different than anything else I had to look at), and I liked listening to her talk, and I liked chipping away at her armor, or at least trying to.

I never told her about her ship, though. Partly out of a lingering need for revenge, for what she'd done to my Game Slave; whenever I thought about it, when I twitched with anger over it and felt like kicking her down those rickety stairs, I reminded myself that I still had a trump card in my deck. I had the power of life and death over her, so long as I didn't tell her Dib had her ship, and it comforted me.

Partly, too, it was because I knew if she had it, she'd leave. And I wasn't so sure I wanted her to.

One night, I cruised into the industrial district with the heat in the car cranked all the way up, swaddled in several layers of coats and a scarf some girl made for me last Christmas. Just one of the many lovely things about our city: it was freezing in the winter, boiling in the summer, and all mud and grit the rest of the year.

Summoned by the squeak of the last step on the stairs, the robot – this time lurking amid a jungle of rusted machinery – leapt onto a conveyor belt, eyes slitting into grim half-moons. "It's just me, Mimi," I sighed. "Calm down."

Unlike that little robot of Zim's, which never seemed to shut up, Tak's didn't speak. At least, not around me. It jerked its head in what might have been a nod and turned to march off down the conveyor belt, the ripped cord on its back dragging behind it.

I walked alongside it onto the factory floor. The first thing I noticed was a heap of rubble in the middle of the floor, making it sag as the boards slowly splintered beneath its weight, and when I looked up I realized where it had come from: at some point since I'd last been there, part of the roof had caved in. Now, moonlight flooded in through a gap bigger than the car I'd driven here, washing the room in white and grey.

"Where's Tak?"

The robot pointed to a mountain of scrap metal across the room. As if on cue, Tak tunneled her way out of it, tossing aside girders and sheets with her spider-legs, climbing down onto the factory floor in a few nimble strides. In her arms, she carried a hodgepodge of useless junk.

"What are you doing?" I asked as she popped the limbs back into her ladybug, setting her treasures on the floor.

"I'm making a new claw attachment for Mimi." She shot me a scowl. "You know, since you severed her old one."

"Right."

Tak settled into a spot on the floor and began sorting through her scrap metal, evidently not in a chatty mood. For awhile, I watched her work, softening and soldering bits of various metals with a blowtorch that sprouted on a jointed arm from her back. Eventually, my gaze turned to the hole in the ceiling, and I shuddered in the cold wind whistling through it; glancing at Tak, I wondered what she had planned for the approaching winter. Or had she figured she'd have bit it by then?

"It's really cold in here."

She didn't look up from her work. "Great observation."

"Sorry, I forgot you come from an ice planet, so you're impervious to the cold," I said sarcastically.

"You don't have to come from an ice planet not to whine about every little change in temperature. It's not hard to have a thicker skin than humans do."

"But do you?" As I spoke, I wandered around her, circling her and her project like a vulture. I enjoyed watching her eyes try and fail not to follow me. "I mean, bugs die in the winter, right? Seems to me they're pretty sensitive to the cold."

"I am not a _bug_."

"Yeah, but you look like one."

I reached down and tweaked the curl of her right antenna, then darted away just in time to avoid an all too intimate encounter with her blowtorch. I knew it pissed her off, but ever since that day when I fixed the weird one, I couldn't keep my hands off her antennae; like a toddler forever pulling her mom's hair, I was incorrigible. They fascinated me. And I was always interested to find out what she would do the next time I touched them – screech at me, smack me, shove me, try to melt my face off with a blowtorch. It was more fun than frickin' Candyland.

"Look, are you just here to harass me?" she snapped. "Because believe it or not, I've got better things to do."

"I'm just wondering what you're going to do. It's only going to get colder, and seeing as you've got a huge frickin' hole in your roof here, so are you."

She shrugged. "I'll go somewhere else, then. There are plenty of buildings here."

"One's not going to be much better than the next."

"I'll manage." She looked up at me with scorn in her eyes, not directed at me (well, okay, a little bit directed at me) so much as the very idea of the cold. "I know you don't understand this, child, but I'm a trained soldier, not a sheltered teenager. I may not have much time left on this dirt clod you call a planet, but when I draw my last breath, it won't be because of a little bit of wind."

All of a sudden, a crack of thunder resounded throughout the room, and a bolt of lightning lit the sky. Seconds later, the clouds opened and a gush of rain poured in through the hole in the roof, soaking Tak and I both; I snickered as she shrieked, burst into smoke, and skittered on her spider-legs underneath a conveyor belt.

"Did I mention that when it gets cold around here, it also tends to rain?"

Cowering under the belt, she split her glare between me and the rain, as if I had bade it fall. "Well, what do you suggest I do?"

"You could come home with me."

She let out a short, barking laugh. "Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not. You could be like E.T. It'd be fun."

She didn't get the joke. "I may be pathetic, but I'm not _that_ pathetic. I am _not _going to turn myself into an insolent Earth child's _pet_."

We both watched the rain as it came down in torrents, pooling on the uneven parts of the floor, trickling in through stray pipes. Drowning her little project within minutes. I could hear lightning strike what sounded like something nearby, setting fire to a burnt-out factory sign or an old warning light.

"Well, the way I see it, here's what could happen," I said. "You could stay here and end up barbecued by this time tomorrow, by the rain or the lightning or both. Or you could come with me, and—you know. Not do that."

So she came with me. It was as if it physically pained her to do so, but she came with me, and so did the robot; by the time I pulled into the driveway, the lights in the house were off, so I figured we'd gotten lucky and everyone was asleep. Still, we treaded lightly, until my door was locked and my blinds were closed.

"So here's the rules," I told her, stripping off several strata of wet coats and dumping them on the floor. "Don't leave my room, unless you want Dib to dissect you. Keep Mimi quiet. And try to resist planting any bombs or anything in my stuff, okay? I'm taking kind of a big risk for you here, and I'm not even entirely sure why, so don't make me regret it."

Tak didn't say anything. She just climbed up onto my bed, scooted back on it, and sat against the wall; dutifully, the robot came to join her. I began shucking my clothes, first my boots, then my skirt and leggings. I tugged my sweater up over my head.

Without much thinking about it, I undid my bra, because I didn't really care how much she saw of me – I'd been naked too often around too many girls to have retained anything resembling modesty. Besides, it was all foreign to her, right? Like watching an animal in a terrarium.

"You have a tattoo," she said.

Before I slipped on my nightshirt – the free promotional T-shirt that had come with my Game Slave 4, relegated to a nightshirt because Dib made me late getting to the mall again and all they had left was extra-extra-large – I paused and glanced down at my hipbone, where her gaze had landed. "Two, actually. The crescent moon there, and a skull on the back of my neck."

I turned around and gathered my hair in one hand to show her. "Why?"

"Oh, well the moon was just this stupid thing. I was dating this one girl, sophomore year, and she thought it would be all meaningful if we got matching tattoos – hers was a sun. I broke up with her a few days later, and she threw the biggest fit."

I threw on my nightshirt and slid up on the bed next to Tak. "The other one's kind of dumb too, but it made sense at the time. I had this necklace I used to wear all the time – this one skull necklace, or sort of a skull, anyway. Now that I think about it, it actually looked more like an electrical outlet, but whatever. I was pretty attached to it, because I'd had it practically forever, you know? I don't even remember who gave it to me.

"Anyway, a few years ago, I lost it. Well, I didn't _lose_ it, exactly—something happened to it. It involved my brother, an aquatic battle mech, and a jar of radioactive mayonnaise, and that's all anybody needs to know." I grimaced at the memory. "He said he would buy me a new one – I mean, I beat him with a tennis racket until he said he would buy me a new one – but instead I made him pay for the tattoo. So no matter what kind of trouble he got me into, I would never lose it again."

"You were right. That is dumb."

"Yeah, well, so's this thing." I flicked the little cord she wore above her left eye, curling around from one side of her head to the other. "What is it, anyway?"

She sniffed disdainfully (a sniff being, with her, more like a _humph_, since she didn't have a nose to sniff with). "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

"It's a wavebreaker. It allows me to channel my own brain waves into disrupting and manipulating those of weaker life forms, as well as a limited range of other electrical impulses. It can be used to give silent commands to Mimi, for example. And I used to use it to interface with my ship." She frowned. "But it hasn't worked properly since the crash."

"You can't fix it?"

"No. Nothing I have on me is advanced enough to interact with that kind of technology without damaging it." As she spoke, one of her hands gravitated towards her temple, and she ran her fingers slowly over the cord. "I had hoped…"

She didn't finish the thought.

We sat there a few moments in silence, listening to the rain pummel my windowpane. The numbers on my bedside clock phased from 11:59 to midnight, and I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. "I'm going to bed. Do you—um—you know, sleep?"

"I didn't used to, at least not every night. But it's easier to conserve the fuel in my pak if I do." She dropped off the edge of my bed, beckoning the robot along with her. "Let's shut down for a bit, shall we?" she said to it, in a tone far gentler than any I'd ever heard her use.

They nestled themselves in the far corner of my room, sitting up side-by-side against the wall, Mimi's head resting on Tak's shoulder. I heard a soft _click _as Mimi powered down, and then – for the rest of the night – nothing.


	6. A Different Kind of Hunger

**5. A Different Kind of Hunger**

"Come oooooooon." My back landed with a _thump_ against my bedroom door, Zara's black fingernails digging into the frame. "We have the house to ourselves."

She rubbed the length of her body along mine as though she were a cat and I a scratching post, all the while fixing me with what I imagine she thought a seductive stare. Instead, her eyes, their lids spread so thickly with purple glitter shadow she could barely hold them up, made me claustrophobic. "You want to get off of me?"

"God, what's _with_ you lately? We haven't fucked in like, _years_."

I rolled my eyes. "Years, days, same thing."

"What I _mean_ is, why are you trying to get rid of me? We used to have so much _fun_." Her arms snaked around my waist and she pulled me into her, grinding her hips against me. Or at least, doing so as best she could, with about three feet of black tulle from her tutu cushioning the impact. "I picked something up at Spencer's the other day. It's this special massage oil, you can lick it and it tastes like—"

"Look," I cut her off, "as enticing as that sounds, I've got a ton of homework to catch up on. Maybe some other time."

Her grin melted into a pout as I wriggled out of her hold. "You're not even going to let me into your room?"

"That's what I said."

"But—we don't have to _do _anything. Really. We could just sit around and listen to music and drink soda. I won't stay too long." She reached out to tug on the zipper of my jacket. "I just want to _be_ with you."

"Go home, Zara." I grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her around, and gave her a little shove to get her going. "Or don't. But don't stay here."

I watched as she trudged down the hall in a cloud of melodrama and candy-apple perfume, grumbling to herself all the way. When I heard the front door open and shut, I finally opened mine. "Sweet cyborg Christ," I groaned as I slung my backpack to the floor, kicking the door shut behind me. "I thought she'd never leave."

Tak was sitting on my bed, taking another shot at welding a new claw for Mimi out of some scrap metal I'd brought her from the garage. She glanced up at me and her antennae twitched, a frown curling the corners of her mouth. "You smell like the circus threw up on you," she said.

"Zara's perfume."

"Of course," she went on, "you always smell overwhelmingly of the sickening stench of humanity, so it's not as if it makes much difference."

I pressed my lips together, resting one hand on my hip. "You want to not use that blowtorch on my bed?"

"You want to be quiet and let me work in peace?"

I narrowed my eyes at her. Then, I turned on my heel, marched down to the kitchen, grabbed a can of soda from the fridge and headed back upstairs to my room. Tak, her eyes shining blue by the light of the blowtorch, didn't seem to notice me. Climbing up beside her on my bed, I shook the soda up good, aimed it at her, and popped the tab.

The blue flame fizzled and she shrieked, sputtering in the spray. "Hey, shut up!" I hissed. "Dib's downstairs!"

She retracted the blowtorch and scrubbed at her face with her forearm, scowling at me through the columns of smoke rising from her skin. "How would you like it if every time I wanted to speak to you, I decided to splash you with bleach? There are other ways to get my attention, you know."

"You told me to shut up and go away. How else was I supposed to stop you from melting my bedspread?"

Her scowl didn't soften, but at least she didn't pull out the blowtorch again. Setting her project aside, she slid back on my bed and curled up against the wall, as was her wont lately – while I did my homework, or read a book, or surfed the web while Zara blabbered at me on the phone, Tak would sit silently at the foot of my bed, her knees gathered to her chest. Sometimes, Mimi would sit with her; others, she would sit on my windowsill and stare out at the road through the slats of my blinds, retrieving as much information as she could under the circumstances.

Inevitably, I would end up watching her, peering at her over my laptop or my book. Marveling at how still she could be. I wasn't sure if she was meditating (Irkens didn't seem like a particularly meditative people, but then again, neither did humans), or daydreaming, or just conserving energy; I couldn't tell if her mind was humming behind her eyes, or if she had zoned out, like a lizard basking on a rock.

I wondered, if she was thinking, what she was thinking about. I wondered if she was thinking about revenge and disgrace, about the hopes she'd built and watched crumble. I wondered if she could feel her fuel cell draining. I wondered what she thought about when she thought about home.

"So this girl." Out of the blue – after about five minutes of silence, during which I'd unpacked my backpack, drained about half my soda, and opened a magazine – Tak reanimated, and addressed me. "Zara."

I liked the way she said Zara's name, more than I actually liked Zara herself – with a wisp of an extra _r _on the end of it, because of her accent (which was still a mystery to me). "Uh-huh."

"She's your…_girlfriend._"

"For now."

"And you exchange saliva and other bodily fluids with her, and put your hands on her underneath her clothes, and stimulate her sexual organs. You mate with her, as animals do."

I couldn't help but laugh. "Yeah, so?"

"So it doesn't make _sense_," she said, so serious I had to hide my smirk behind my hand. "Life forms that reproduce sexually are compelled to propagate their species by the biological _need_ to reproduce – your dating, your marriage, your Valentine's Day and all that stupid meat, it all happens because the male of the species is encoded to sow his seed, and the female is encoded to receive it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to stand each other long enough to breed. It's basic science.

"And yet you engage in these—_disgusting_ rituals with Zara, who is female, and with whom you stand absolutely no chance of passing on your genetic material. From a scientific perspective, it's a completely self-defeating behavior." She fixed me with a narrow-eyed stare – as if, by fucking Zara, I was going to singlehandedly run the human race into the ground. "Explain yourself."

I could feel a grin spreading across my face, just thinking of the places this conversation could take us. "You tell me something first, Tak," I said sweetly, edging closer to her on the bed. "Do you know what it's like to feel …_physically_ good?"

She looked at me as if the question were absurd. "Of course I do. I've been hungry and eaten. I've been wounded and healed."

"Right. That's why Zara and I do what we do." My smile widened. "Because it feels good."

"Mating isn't like being hungry and eating."

"Sure it is. It's just a different kind of hunger, that's all." I picked up my soda from where it sat on my nightstand, and swirled it around a second before lifting it to my lips for a swig. "You're not wild about being touched, are you?"

At that, she turned up her nose, or looked like she would have if she'd had one. "Irkens aren't a touchy-feely race."

"That being the reason you flip out whenever I mess with your antennae." Having established that, I reached out to run my fingers along the one nearest me, and a warning growl formed deep in her throat. "Come on. It's not as if it hurts."

"Of course it doesn't hurt, you twit." Her hand shot up and grabbed my wrist. "I just don't see why you feel the need to keep doing it."

"I'm trying to _explain myself. _If you're so set on figuring out why humans _mate_ for more than reproduction, you need to understand that sometimes, it feels good just to be touched."

"Has it occurred to you that what feels good to humans might not necessarily feel good to me?"

"Has it occurred to _you_ that it might?" I tried and failed to yank my wrist out of her grip. For a three-foot-tall insectoid who kept implying she was about to croak, Tak could be pretty frickin' strong. "Would you just let me, already? I've been dying to for weeks."

Her gaze slid sideways to the can in my other hand, still sloshing with a good few gulps of soda. If there was one thing I was proud of (next to my mastery of the Game Slave), it was my ability to shake a blast like a fire hose out of any can, down to the very last drop. "Are you going to spray me again if I don't?"

"Probably."

So she let go of my wrist. She folded her arms on her knees, and rested her head on her arms, and turned her head away from me, towards the window and Mimi peering out of it. I could see her brace herself, so as not to give me the pleasure of a reaction, but she still flinched when my fingers landed – when I began by trailing them, very gently, down the length of her left antenna.

First just the tips of my fingers, then the pads, so that I could actually _feel_ her, like I never could when I was just being grabby to get on her nerves. The impressions registered slowly. The surface between my fingers was slick, but not wet, and hard but not unyielding; I might have compared it to the shaft of a feather, or a snake's skin minus the texture of scales, but neither would've been entirely accurate. It was like nothing I'd felt before.

And she _liked_ it. She'd never have said so, but she liked it, I could tell. I'd loosened up my share of nervous virgins – rosy-cheeked Rapunzels who had to be coaxed down from their towers, girls who hadn't been touched since the last time Daddy kissed them goodnight – and I knew the signs.

As I traced the swirl at the end of her left antenna, I felt her breaths begin to grow longer, saw her muscles relaxing under her clothes. A few minutes more and her eyelids fluttered, then shut. This time, I knew for sure she wasn't thinking about anything. I'd watched my share of red-lipped Sleeping Beauties waking up and blissing out, and it was written all over her face.

The minutes ticked by on my clock and I just sat there stroking her, letting her float. There was something sort of hypnotic about her antennae, spiraling in on themselves, little whirlpools that sucked my fingers in and spat them out to start all over again. I wished I could work on them both at the same time and really make her shiver, but that would've required getting behind her, and from where I sat all I could do was alternate when it occurred to me.

She seemed more than content with that, though, so I was too. It was enough for me just to _see _her content – that bone-deep, whole-body content, born only of an especially pleasant, sustained sensation – when she so rarely seemed happy at all.

Once, Mimi turned her gaze from the window, halving one eye as if to say _and what exactly is going on here? _I lifted one shoulder in a shrug – only slightly, so I wouldn't shift my weight and disturb Tak – and grinned.

I wasn't sure how long it had been when I finally felt Tak stir – when she opened her eyes, first one, then the other, like lights flickering on. "Are you satisfied?" she mumbled, into the pillow she'd made of her arms.

"Are you?"

For a second, I thought I saw the color of her cheeks deepen, not reddening but going a darker shade of green. For a second, she was almost turquoise, and it took everything I had not to burst out laughing. "Humans," she muttered to herself, scooting off of my bed. "I'm going to have to disinfect my antennae now."

"Should I go get you some bleach?"

She shot me a sneer and went for her little mound of scrap metal, moving it from my bed to the floor to resume working on Mimi's claw. I watched her, still wondering. Wondering what kind of thoughts I'd sown in her head. Wondering where else she might enjoy being touched, and what kind of feedback I might earn if I got her to let me. Wondering why I cared at all for her happiness, when I'd never given two shits about people who'd been much nicer to me.

Then, I stopped wondering, and went back to my magazine.


	7. Courting Rituals

The exchange about Gaz's last name in this chapter is a reference to a joke in "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom", when the Meekrob-shoes address Dib as "Dib...whatever your last name is" and he says "That's right."

**6. Courting Rituals**

The days passed – lazily, comfortably – and we fell into a routine, Tak and I. When I got home from school, I would snarf a snack in the kitchen, and sock Dib in the shoulder if he was around; upstairs, I would shrug off my jacket, unlace my boots, and flop down on my bed, with a magazine or my iPod or my phone (on which, in the absence of my Game Slave, I'd been reduced to playing crappy online games). She would be doing whatever she was doing, and after a little while, we would talk.

It didn't especially matter what about. Sometimes, it was the weather (it was still arctic outside and raining off and on most days, though by that point I suspected it didn't much matter); sometimes, it was a question she had, another scientific inquiry into the oddities and intricacies of human behavior; sometimes, it was her day; sometimes, it was mine.

Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly introspective, she would tell me a little about Irk and her life before Zim, before everything in her head was eclipsed by a giant neon sign flashing REVENGE. Our exchanges grew steadily less venomous, if not exactly friendly. She didn't insult me as often, and I left the soda in the fridge.

Eventually, the conversation would carry us to the point where she would climb up on my bed. And we would get closer, and closer (sometimes, I was good about it; others, I made her come to me), until we were _close enough_, and I would start stroking her antennae, and any semblance of dialogue would scatter like leaves in the wind.

Her eyes would drift shut and she would make this sound, deep in her throat, between a sigh and a purr. It was so soft that I couldn't hear it in anything less than complete silence – not if my phone buzzed, or rain plinked against the windowpane, or Mimi's joints made that mechanical _zzt_ noise as she moved across the room – but when I could, I relished every second.

Sometimes, if I was quiet enough, and she was relaxed enough, she would let me wander – let me scratch her a little around the back of her head and the nape of her neck, so long as I was gentle about it. That was when I found out that her skin, smooth though it looked, was at first a layer of microscopic scales.

Tiny, interlocking plates of armor, so perfectly molded it was as if she'd been dipped in them, that receded and vanished a few seconds after I touched her, revealing a disarming softness to her skin. On human skin, you can always see the pores, the down, the blue ghosts of veins, no matter how much cream or wax or makeup you slog on; the most alien thing about Tak yet was that hers was perfect.

Of course, there was no going any further. A few inches south of her neck and I'd hit her pak (she'd demanded I stop calling it a ladybug, on pain of finding all of my electronics converted into hostile minimechs the next time I came home from school), and not only was it entirely useless as an erogenous zone, she was about six times as protective of it as she'd been of her antennae from the start. Just touching it by accident would earn me a slap and a cold shoulder for the rest of the day, no matter how good she'd been feeling at the time.

Not too long after our one-month anniversary, I decided it was high time I dumped Zara. I mean, I figure when you'd rather sit around petting an alien than make out with your girlfriend, that's got to be a sign. I'd been blowing her off near every day for a week by then, so it couldn't have come as a big surprise to her, but she howled with the best of them when I broke the news. Unlike April, she wasn't a weepy, please-take-me-back-I'll-try-harder type, but a stomping, shouting, you'll-regret-this-you-frigid-bitch type, which I guess was an interesting change of pace.

In any case, it seemed like I'd shed a three-hundred pound weight (more like a hundred and twenty pounds, plus a hundred and eighty pounds of studded jewelry, fake leather and striped tights), and I'd never felt lighter dropping onto my bed. "So this is what freedom feels like," I sighed. "I almost forgot."

Tak sat cross-legged on the floor with Mimi facedown in her lap, a panel on her back open and a mysterious tool from Tak's pak buried in her circuitry. On my bed, I could hear the implement buzzing, and see sparks reflected on my ceiling. "I take it you got rid of Zara," she said, sounding somewhat less than captivated.

"Finally. Thank God."

"Yes, well. On to the next receptacle for your revolting urges."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, before I head out to the paddock to find another mare to mount, I think I'll just graze awhile. Remind myself why I don't need some girl slobbering on me all the time."

"Your power of insight is truly stunning."

Pushing myself up on my hands, I surveyed Tak's makeshift workshop on the carpet, an idea forming in my head. "I feel like celebrating."

"Celebrating what? Your severing of obligations to Zara?"

"Exactly. I want to do something fun." I pursed my lips. "I want to do something fun," I amended, "and know she's not going to text and interrupt me halfway through."

"Then by all means, child," she said, in a tone that implied she was losing her patience with this thread of conversation, "do something _fun_."

I came over and plopped down on the carpet beside her, pretzeling my legs and scooting up close to her so that I could see what she was doing. "Let's do something fun _together._"

She snorted. "Like what?"

"I don't know. Dad's on tour doing live tapings of his show, and Dib's not gonna be here tonight – I think he's camping out in the woods with the Eyeballs, staking out Bigfoot or something. We have the house to ourselves." It was funny how much more appealing that sounded, when it was me saying it to her instead of Zara saying it to me. "We could hang out downstairs. Watch a movie."

"Right. Because I can think of no better way to spend my time than infecting my eyeballs with the sewer sludge humans call _entertainment_."

"Come on. You could pick it." I knew she wouldn't appreciate the magnitude of that sacrifice, but a sacrifice it was; I couldn't remember the last time I'd relinquished that power to anyone.

For the first time since I'd come in, she looked up from her work, the tool in her hand flickering as it powered down. "Look," she said flatly. "As unequivocally _thrilling_ as that sounds, in case you haven't noticed, I'm kind of busy here. Mimi's coordination systems have been glitching lately, and I'm not about to waste my time vegetating with you when she can barely walk straight."

"Well, let me see her. Maybe I can fix it."

She laughed like she had when I first suggested she stay with me – as if she thought I was coming down with an infestation of brain worms. "That's a good one."

"Oh, shut up." Elbowing her aside, I leaned over Mimi's shell, did a quick once-over of the tangle of machinery inside, and went with my first instinct, same as I had when I fixed her ship. There were a couple of wires in there calling my name.

Grabbing each between an index finger and thumb, I pressed their ends together and they fused, melding instantly into one continuous length. Then, I shut the panel on Mimi's back, and her eyes flashed red; leaping up from Tak's lap, she began patrolling the perimeter of my bedroom, walking straight as I'd ever seen her.

Tak's eyes widened and I grinned, adding a third bullet to my list of things to be proud of: my knack for pulling off the impossible, given the right motivation. "Looks like your night just freed up."

I dragged them both downstairs and Mimi headed off to survey the house, evidently delighted to have a new environment to assess. Meanwhile, I emptied the DVD rack onto the couch, and Tak and I sat sifting through the discs – most of them being either slasher flicks, Dib's sci-fi shit, or softcore lesbian porn.

She wasn't impressed. "And I thought _Intestines of War_ was bad."

"Okay, so they're not exactly award-winning films. Haven't you ever heard of a cult classic?" Fishing through the pile, I came up with a case emblazoned with D-list actresses in thigh-skimming plaid skirts and cropped button-downs. "_Attack of the Catholic Schoolgirls _was pretty good. Especially the part with the vampires."

She picked up another case and puzzled over the title. "What's a ninja drag queen? And where in your solar system is Planet Weird?"

"Nowhere you need to worry about." I plucked the case from her hands and tossed it back in with the rest, replacing it with another one. "How do you feel about _Voodoo Lizard Men 3?_"

"Roughly the same as I feel about _Sleepover at Candi Love's: Truth or Dare Edition._"

"Which I take it is less than optimistic." I sighed, shoving aside a layer of rejects to dig through the dregs of the heap. "All right, let's see - _Zombies_ _in Paradise, Crack Babies and Kookaburras, Mysterious Mysteries: The Movie, Zombies in Paradise 2, Idealistic White Teacher Forever Changes The Lives of a Misfit Band of Multiracial Inner-City Students…_any of that appeal to your delicate sensibilities?"

Apparently having ignored everything I'd just said, she passed one DVD from hand to hand and frowned down at her palms, covered in the glitter the case was shedding by the pound. "What's this fresh abomination?"

"That's _Princess Glitterina_! I thought Dad chucked it ages ago!"

I snatched the case from her hands. I hadn't seen it since I was about three, but the cover was exactly as I remember it: silver sparkles painted on over a tricolor rainbow, the title in pink curlicue font, and a cartoon of a yellow-haired princess riding a unicorn, poised to gallop off into the sunset. "I used to watch this _constantly_ when I was a little kid. I mean seriously, infinite loop. You can ask Dib; I'm pretty sure he couldn't get near the TV for a good two years."

Tak, still obsessing over the glitter stuck to her hands, only glanced up for a second. "What's it about?"

"Oh, all kinds of ridiculous shit. She rides around on this unicorn and swims with mermaids and sings to woodland creatures, you know, defeats witches with the power of goodness and dimples. It's incredibly saccharine. Come to think of it, that's probably why I can't stand that stuff now; I overdosed while I was still in diapers." I opened the case and popped out the disc. "Let's watch it. For old times' sake."

"_Your _old times." She frowned. "I thought you said I could pick the movie."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't as if you were doing a stellar job of that. Stick this in the DVD player for me, okay? I'm going to go nuke some dinner."

In the kitchen, I emptied a bag of mini corndogs onto a paper plate and popped them into the microwave, and grabbed a soda and a bottle of mustard while it worked its magic. When they were done, I headed back to the living room to rejoin Tak, who was watching the decades-old previews for _Princess Glitterina_ and looking unamused.

All of a sudden, it occurred to me that it might be kind of insensitive for me to sit there wolfing down mini corndogs with a mustard chaser when she was, you know, basically dying of starvation. I set my plate on the couch cushion between us and looked at it sideways, wondering what _would_ count as sensitive in this situation. "So…you can't eat any human food at all?" I finally broached the subject, during a preview for _Princess Glitterina 2: Legend of the Starmaker. _"No matter what?"

"No. I'd just throw it up later." She sniffed in the general direction of my dinner. "Not as if I'd _want_ to. I think I'd rather starve to death than soil my tongue with that processed cow dung."

And so, absolved of my guilt, I sucked a corndog off its toothpick, squirted a shot of mustard into my mouth, and smiled when Tak mimed a dry heave.

Princess Glitterina was every bit as sugary as I remembered her, each step she took accompanied by a swirl of poorly-animated sparkles and each song she sang subtitled in fat, bouncy letters that scrolled across the bottom of the screen, an equally fat, bouncy bluebird hopping from word to word keeping time. Still, it was as good for a laugh as _Crack Babies and Kookaburras_ would've been, and it was one hell of a trip down Memory Lane.

Obviously, Tak didn't appreciate it like I did (did she even have a childhood to remember? How long ago had it been?), but it blew my mind to realize that every frame was faintly familiar. That all of it, however deeply buried, still lingered around a corner in my head.

There was a lot of snarking going on throughout, but at one point – about a third of the way through, when Princess Glitterina used a vial of fairy dust to turn herself into a mermaid – Tak became especially infuriated, and didn't hesitate to share it with me. "I can't stand another second of this. Do humans actually _believe _these things could happen?"

"Of course we don't. We might be stupid, but we're not_ that_ stupid."

"Then why would you show this to your young? Aren't you supposed to be preparing them to function in society, not willfully warping their perception of reality?"

"So Irkens never lie to their kids?"

"Irkens lack a life stage analogous to childhood, because we never chose to hobble ourselves by constructing one. We see no point in dumping an inordinate portion of our time and resources into coddling an entire sector of our society based on how long they've been sucking atmosphere." She hitched her head in a way that reminded me of how Zara used to toss her hair to make a point. "But it's safe to say that if we had _kids_, we wouldn't lie to them."

"I guess it doesn't matter. Based on what I've seen, most of you are adult children, anyway."

She slit her eyes at me. "Mind your tongue, child. You shouldn't mouth off about things you don't understand."

As Princess Glitterina and her troupe of mermaids sailed through a forest of multicolored seaweed, I studied Tak from across the couch, chewing thoughtfully on a toothpick. "You're always calling me _child_," I observed, a few minutes out from her last warning. "Speaking of children, I'm not a child."

"Compared to me, you are."

"Well, how old are you?"

"Much older than you."

"How much older?"

"Older than any human you'll ever meet. Thus, you, having lived for only sixteen years, seem to me very much a _child_." She rearranged herself haughtily on the couch (and yes, it's hard to picture how someone can rearrange themselves haughtily until you've seen Tak do it). "If you live until you're a hundred and ten, you'll still be a child to me."

I considered that, sipping my soda. "Do you even know what my real name is?"

"Of course I do."

"Then what is it?"

She paused a minute, as if to speak my name would be to make some sort of concession – to admit that I, who'd been housing and hiding her for weeks now, who took pity on her when she didn't deserve it, who touched her like she'd never been touched and heard her make sounds no one had ever heard her make, who'd crushed her last shot at ever being anything with a memory disc and the Macarena, wasn't just a _child_, but a _person_. That I was an inextricable part of her life now, however much of it was left, for better or for worse. That she could no longer pretend she'd be able to write me off.

"It's Gaz."

"And my last name?"

She furrowed her brow. "I don't know."

I grinned. "That's right."

By then, Princess Glitterina was wandering through the Enchanted Forest, and for awhile we sat in silence and watched her. It had to be silent, for my empty plate to be flicked to the coffee table, and the space between us to be closed by conspicuously inconspicuous degrees; we couldn't be talking, when my fingers first slid along the spiral of her left antenna, because she didn't want to have to acknowledge it was happening. She just wanted to sit still and be petted, and I was content to feel her melt under my hand.

_Princess Glitterina_, being a kids' movie, was short. Only eighty minutes, actually. So when it ended, and the light from the TV flickered out, and it was just Tak and I and the streetlights' glow filtering in through the blinds and the faint _zzt_ of Mimi's limbs as she investigated some other room, I wasn't ready to get up.

I said nothing to rouse her, introduced no change to my rhythm. She wasn't making that noise I liked, the sound of cars passing on the road outside making her linger at the edges of her consciousness, but her eyes were closed, their lashes still.

I wondered how it was that she had eyelashes, when she didn't otherwise have hair. They were the prettiest I'd ever seen, in years of girlfriends brandishing liner pencils and mascara wands – the way they streamlined her eyes, made them sharp, gave them an energy and an absoluteness and made it so that their particular shade of purple, like the stained glass between black veins, shone all the brighter – but I didn't understand them. Maybe that made them even prettier. Maybe that was why, the longer I looked at her, the more I found myself thinking of how they might feel against my cheeks.

My eyes were growing used to the dark and I could see her better now, her silhouette draped over the couch, the long curling lines of her antennae conforming to its curves. My fingers drifted down, skirting her wavebreaker. I brushed my thumb along the beauty mark under her left eye, vaguely amused to find it textureless.

I knew it was nicer not to say _mole_, when it came to similar features on humans, but in this case it really was something different. Just another daub of paint on her landscape, or maybe that was the wrong metaphor – I suspected she'd think herself more a digital painting than a stretched canvas, cleaner and slicker and sharper than oils on dried animal hide.

And that was how, to avoid mincing words, I ended up leaning down, and in, and so close I could feel her against me, feel her warmth, her breath, the pulse of everything under her skin working so desperately to keep her alive another day, and stroking her cheek with my thumb, and seeing her, just for a second, open her eyes, just a sliver of that particular shade of purple, and _knowing_ she knew, and she wasn't going to stop me, and so pressing my mouth to hers.

On second thought, maybe it wasn't the best moment I could've picked. I mean, I probably tasted like frickin' mustard, and God knows _that_ wasn't what I wanted her to think of me. But she tasted of smoke and metal and cardamom, and something else I could never have named but would remember forever, and there was an electricity in kissing her that lit me up from my tongue to my toes.

That, and the distinct sensation of having _started something_, of having flipped a coin or spun a die and made a decision without knowing it. Of having said something more than _you're driving me crazy and I'm going to kiss the shit out of you until my guts quit tying themselves in knots. _

What it was would take a long time to know.

Longer, at least, than the kiss lasted, though it did last a surprisingly long time. It took her a good five seconds to jerk away, and smack me, and scramble to the other side of the couch, yowling, "What on Irk are you doing?!"

I figured right then wasn't the best time to crack up at her choice of phrase. "Only what you were letting me do."

She scowled at me from across the couch. Even in the dark, I could sense the splotches of dark green blossoming on her cheeks. "Listen, this can't keep happening," she snapped. "If you're going to keep forcing these—these human courting rituals on me, I can't be around you."

"I understand." I got to my feet. "I'm going to bed. Nobody else should be around til tomorrow afternoon, so you're free to stay down here and have your space if that's what you want." Before she could dodge me, I bent to kiss her once more, lightly, hoping she could feel my smile against her lips. "Sweet dreams, Sticky Tak."


	8. That Particular Shade of Purple

**7. That Particular Shade of Purple**

"What did you call me?"

It was to this demand that I woke the next morning. I sat up in my bed to find Tak sitting at the end of it, staring me down; I couldn't tell if she'd slept there or just watched me all night, but it was clear she'd been there awhile. _I guess she didn't need as much space as she let on. _"What?" I asked, still a little groggy, fisting my hands to rub my eyes.

"Last night, child," she said impatiently. "Before you went upstairs. What did you call me?"

"Oh, you mean Sticky Tak?"

"Yes. What does it mean?"

"It's a pun. What, Irkens don't have puns?" I kicked off the covers, swung my feet to the floor, and headed for the bathroom down the hall, Tak trailing me all the way. "Sticky Tack is this gummy stuff you buy in packs and use to stick shit to your walls. It's funny because it sounds like your name. Any questions?"

She stayed a few steps back from me while I turned on the sink and splashed my face with water, glaring at me from the doorway. "I fail to see how that's _funny_."

"Would you prefer Tic Tak?"

"I would _prefer _you didn't mock me because of something I didn't choose."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, don't get your panties in a wad. It's _affectionate_."

"_Affectionate._ Right." I squirted a glob of toothpaste onto my electric toothbrush and shoved it into my mouth, pressing the button to turn it on. It was hard to hear her over the noise it made, but she looked dead serious, so I did my best – the best I could do with my mouth buzzing and dripping toothpaste, anyway - to mirror her expression. "Speaking of _affection_," she said, nearly choking on the word, "I have something I need to tell you.

"I've decided that, in the interest of keeping the peace, I'm willing to overlook last night's…indiscretion. As unacceptable as your actions were, I understand your species' compulsion to seek physical gratification at the cost of common sense, and I can accept that your—_disgusting _behavior may not be entirely your fault.

"As for your insinuation that I was a willing participant…" She folded her arms, sort of hugging herself, and scowled at the floor. "_That _was patently false. But I am choosing to forgive you for it, if only to avoid making things more difficult for myself."

I switched off my toothbrush, spat into the sink, and scooped up some water into my cupped hands, slurping it up to wash the toothpaste from my mouth. After a few swishes and another spit, I grabbed a hand towel to wipe off my mouth, and turned to approach her at the door. "I'm glad you're being so diplomatic about this," I said. "Because I'm going to do it again."

With that, I leaned down, caught her chin in my hand, and kissed her for the third time. I didn't make her choose whether or not to let me linger; it was a short kiss, a light one, and I was back at the mirror pulling a brush through my hair almost before she knew what had hit her. Secure in the knowledge that at least this time, I didn't taste like mustard.

She growled and propelled herself to my level on her spider-legs, stalking over to the sink to hiss into my ear. "You are _insufferable_, child."

"And you love it." Snaking an arm around behind her, I gave one of her antennae a tug, then swept out of the room before she could sock me for it. "I'm going downstairs to grab some breakfast," I yelled as I strolled down the hall. "Come keep me company, 'kay?"

I collected the first of the day's sodas from the fridge, and found a half-empty box of waffles in the freezer. No sooner had I popped a few in the toaster than Tak traipsed in, however grudgingly, apparently having run into Mimi on her way downstairs. "This house," she muttered to herself as she pulled out a chair at the table, clambering onto it and scooting in. "I feel like I've spent half my life in this horrible house."

Mimi climbed up onto the counter to watch the waffles cook. "You must know it pretty well by now, huh?" I said. "You were here nearly every day when you went to school with Dib."

"Don't remind me," she said, shuddering. "It's not just this house, it was that _school_, and those _kids_—those horrible kids. I was breaking out in hives under my hologram. I don't know how Zim's been doing it this long." She paused, her features sliding into a frown. "Wait, yes I do. He's a complete _moron!"_

She groaned and her head thunked down on the table, just as the toaster dinged. I shook my head as I extracted my waffles. If _I'd _spent fifty years of _my_ life trying to avenge myself on someone as functionally retarded as Zim, only to end up where she was now, I figured I'd feel pretty hopeless too.

"Maybe it's a good thing you won't live as long as I have," I heard her mumble over the squelch of the syrup bottle, as I squeezed what was left in it onto my waffles and brought my plate to the table. When I sat down across from her, she glanced ruefully up at me, resting her chin in her hand. "I've been around longer than any human on Earth, but in all that time, I feel as if I've only learned one thing."

"Which is?"

"Life is unfair."

Not a lot changed, after that. Our routine chugged along faithfully, down a track with an indeterminate terminus, punctuated only by the kisses I stole – and it _was_ very much stealing, in the beginning. I would have to surprise her, swoop down on her, and sidestep her slaps when I let go.

She wouldn't own up to enjoying it as (relatively, implicitly) quickly as she had with my petting her, but I knew she did; she always gave a little, let me in a little, let it go on a second longer than she would have if it had been that repulsive. I could always feel her pulse (or whatever you'd call the physical rhythm inside her) quicken, her breath thicken, when my lips met hers.

"If it makes you feel any better," I told her once, "it's weird for me, too. I mean, no offense, but you're not exactly in the running for Playmate of the Month."

She frowned. "That doesn't make me feel better."

"Then maybe," I said with a grin, leaning in to kiss her, "this will."

And eventually, it got easier. Eventually, she would anticipate me, but she wouldn't stop me; I would find her ready when I caught her, and her lips sliding open before I had to bite them. Eventually, I got to feel the flicker of her tongue (and God, it was slick and sweet and about a jillion miles longer than mine, and absolutely ruined me for kissing anyone else).

And sometimes – always at night, so that she could pretend it was a mistake, that she'd confused the darkness behind her eyelids with the darkness thrumming between us – she would break away to catch her breath, and open her eyes just a little bit, and look at me in this way that made me nearly knock her over in my redoubled rush to burn the taste of her into my mouth.

It was a good thing I wasn't overly concerned with labels. I had no idea what I ought to call myself now.

Except for a heartless jerk, maybe, because she was getting worse. Around that night when we watched the movie, she'd begun her downhill slide, and I could see it happening. Every day when I came home from school, she looked a little bit paler, her eyes a little duller, her antennae wilting like flower stalks.

Every time I sat with her and stroked her, her skin felt a little cooler to the touch. She had less and less strength to move, to speak, and there were times when I feared she was only letting me kiss her because she didn't have the energy to push me off.

I told myself, _I'm going to tell her. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. The day after that. Surely one more day couldn't hurt. I'll tell her, and she'll do something horrible to me for not telling her, and then she'll get better and disappear forever and live for another thousand years somewhere a million light-years away from here, forgetting me entirely, doing great and terrible things and all the while I'll just be here, staring up at the stars, thinking about how I'll never meet anyone as smart as she was, and I'll never see that particular shade of purple again. _

I told myself what I had told her: _you're pathetic._

One night, I tromped upstairs after dinner to find her curled up on my bed, asleep. Mimi was sitting beside her, sort of brooding over her, looking as deep in thought as a tin can with limbs possibly can. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and then I crouched beside the bed to wake Tak.

"Hey." I roused her much more gently than I might have a few weeks ago, running a thumb along her cheek instead of pulling her antennae or snapping my fingers in her face. "What are you doing dozing off, Sticky?" I said when her eyes blinked open. "The night is young."

"Is it?" She pushed herself up into a sitting position, glancing dazedly around the room. Her eyes landed on my clock, reading seven forty-five, and she shook her head, rubbing one eye with the heel of her hand. "It feels much later."

I didn't know for sure that it was a side effect of her fuel cell draining, but her internal clock was definitely off. As of late, she never seemed to have any sense of where we were in time – when something was supposed to happen, or how long we'd been doing one thing or another. "Won't be long now," she mumbled to herself, disturbingly matter-of-factly. Mimi's eyes drooped.

"Hey, let's get out of here," I said suddenly, to break the gloom settling over us. "Let's go up on the roof."

She shot me a look that simulated raising an eyebrow – her left eye bugging out, her right eyelid dropping to half-mast. "What?"

"Come on. We'll be sneaky. And once we get up there, no one'll be able to see you."

"You've lost your mind, child. It's _freezing_ outside."

"We'll bring blankets. Electric blankets, if you want."

I saw her consider it for a minute, even turn her head towards the window. It must've been ages since she'd seen the stars. Still, she shook her head again, sinking down on my bed, sighing, "I don't know. I don't feel very well."

"You never feel very well. The fresh air'll be good for you." I went over to my closet and started hauling out the blankets folded in the upper shelves. "It's a nice clear night, so we'll be able to see stars out the wazoo. You can tell me some stories about them, huh?"

She rolled her eyes at that last, but at least she agreed to come with me. We stole down the hall quickly and quietly, past the stairs and Dib's room to the trapdoor in the ceiling at the end of the hall. I grabbed the pullcord and unfolded the ladder up to the roof, and together we climbed out into the ice-cold night.

We wrapped ourselves in a few layers of blankets each and lay down in the middle of the roof, staring up at the stars. I only had one electric blanket, which had lain gathering dust in my closet for years, but since I was such a _nice_ person (nice enough to give her the blanket, not nice enough to tell her to just open the garage door already), I let her use it.

We lay there awhile without speaking, just feeling the wind flutter across our faces, her side nestled against mine as if it were made to fit there. I slipped an arm around her shoulders and played with one of her antennae, winding and unwinding my fingers through the swirl at the end.

She had her head sort of buried in my shoulder, and soon enough, I could feel her breaths wavering into long, soft sighs; they welled up in her throat and reverberated through the blankets, breaking over my skin like waves. Above them, I could just hear the distant sound of cars rumbling over pavement. I wondered if she knew she was purring a little louder than usual, or if her hearing was starting to go.

When we did talk, we talked about constellations. Or rather, I talked about constellations, without really knowing if she was listening. "That's…Orion, I think," I said, pointing up at the cluster of stars directly above us. "The hunter."

"Uh-huh."

"And that one—with the two bright stars—that's Gemini. The twins. Doesn't look much like twins to me, but whatever, I didn't name it."

"Right."

"And over there is…umm…Sagittarius? Wait, no. Is Sagittarius winter or summer?"

"Would you give it up already?" she finally snapped, out of the blue. "Constellations are a joke." With a vague, sweeping gesture indicating the whole of the sky, she added, "What does it matter, if this bunch of stars just happens to look like a man, and this other one like a dog? What difference does it make if you chart them, and wait for them to come back every year?

"Who does it help? What does it mean? If humans can devote so much energy to staring slack-jawed at the stars, you'd think you'd have won all your wars and cured all your diseases, and it was just for lack of things to do."

I shrugged. "Well, not everyone who's looking at the stars is in the position to win wars and cure diseases."

"Whatever. It's not as if it would matter if they did." She rolled over so that she was flat on her back, scowling up at the sky, instead of snuggled into my side. "You know what I've come to realize, child? It doesn't matter. None of it. To the universe, we're all as young as you are to me, and in a few millennia everything we've built will be gone. Our suns will implode. Our planets will freeze. The Irken Empire, the human race; it's pointless to draw distinctions. Soon enough, we'll all return to dust."

"You're not morbid at all, are you?"

"No, I'm not. I'm just coming to terms with the truth." She let out a hard breath. "All my life I've been—struggling, fighting, and for what? To rot in a corner of your bedroom, forgotten by everyone I ever knew? My life has meant _nothing_, but even if I'd had what I wanted – even if I'd made it to my test on time, and become an invader, and laid waste to an entire solar system for the glory of the Irken Empire – who would have cared in a thousand, two thousand years? What would all that glory have come to, in the end? What is _glory_, anyway? Just something somebody made up.

"Don't you get it? Everything is just—a construct, a convention. We make it all up, to assure ourselves we're not meaningless. Even things like right and wrong, black and white, day and night—there's no _day and night_ in space, you know. It's just blackness. Endless night."

I watched as her eyelids drifted shut, her temper calming as quickly as it had flared, silence falling over her like a shroud. "Maybe that's what death is like," she said after a minute, more quietly than before. "Endless night."

_God. _I couldn't fucking handle this. "Jesus, lighten up, would you?" I rolled over on top of her – not resting all my weight on her, for fear I might break her, but planting my hands on either side of her and looking down into her eyes. "We're alive right now, aren't we? _That's_ what matters."

She regarded me bitterly. "I'm not even sure when _right now_ is."

I wanted to tell her, _quit feeling sorry for yourself already. You're not going to die. You're going to get the hell out of here and never come back, and never think of this place again; I'm the one who's going to be stuck on this _filthy rock_ forever, dying slowly. Me and my stupid dumb school and my stupid crazy brother and my stupid busted Game Slave, becoming the ruins of humanity. You have all the time in the universe to find out what glory is. I have eighty years, tops, to conform. _

I told myself, _I _will _tell her. Tomorrow. _


	9. Tomorrow Comes

**8. Tomorrow Comes**

"I have something to show you."

I stood in my doorway, hip cocked, arms folded, wearing combat boots and a pleated mini. Tak sat on my bed, just waking from a nap. "So bring it in here," she muttered, rubbing one eye.

"I can't. You have to come with me." I jerked my head to indicate the hallway. "Dib and Dad are both out, so we're fine for now. But you'd better haul ass before they get home."

She looked at me like a kid looks at her dad as he drags her out of the toy store. "Is that tone really necessary?"

I sighed. "Just come on. Once you see this, you're not going to care about my _tone_."

Grumbling something about how _that_ was highly unlikely, she slid off of my bed, and followed me through the hall and down the stairs. We swung by the kitchen and I grabbed a soda from the fridge, tossing it from hand to hand without popping the tab until we reached the door that joined the house to the garage. I didn't say anything, before I opened it, and I didn't let myself pause.

Tak's ship was still there, as it had been for six years. Its dents had been filled, its scratches buffed out, but it sat there intubated like a patient in the ICU, radiating cold and corrosion. It had been months since Dib had been out here working on it, and months since the last time before that.

He had all but given up getting it airborne, after six years of trying and failing, and I suspected looking at it now just made him bitter. Standing there with Tak in that moment, the silence between us thick as the dust on her ship's windshield, I finally understood how he felt.

She didn't gasp, or cry out, or step back. She didn't even widen her eyes. Instead, as I watched her, she narrowed them slowly, as if to be sure she was seeing what she thought she was—and then, with a near-imperceptible clench of her jaw, she whirled on me, shooting up on two of her spider-legs. Before I could think to wonder where they were, the other two sliced through the air, whiplike, and struck me across the face so hard it sent me stumbling back into the wall.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?!" she screamed, looming over me, seething.

I lifted a hand to rub my smarting cheek, already beginning to bruise and swell. "I did tell you," I said evenly, looking her in the eyes. "Just now."

"Why didn't you tell me _before_?!"

"It doesn't matter. I've told you now."

She hung there glowering at me, contemplating wringing the breath from my throat with the silver limbs whose shadows crisscrossed my face. I fingered the can of soda in my hand. After what seemed an endless faceoff, she belted out the fiercest snarl in her catalogue, a sound like a lioness on the prowl; then, she turned her back on me, and strode on her spider-legs towards her ship.

Now fairly sure I wouldn't have to use it to defend myself, I pressed the cold soda can to my swollen cheek, watching as she pushed open the ship's windshield and climbed inside. Slipping through and past the cockpit, she removed a panel neither Dib nor I had ever noticed from the back wall, and disappeared into the cavity beyond it.

A minute later, she emerged carrying a silver crate, which she laid on the floor and opened by swiping her palm across the lid. Inside lay several rows of translucent, sort of egg-shaped discs, each no bigger than a hand mirror. She prized one out of its compartment and her spider-legs lifted it from her hands, swiveling around behind her to insert it, like sliding a CD into a computer, into the central port on her pak.

She paused a moment, blinking. Then, she inhaled sharply, and her antennae perked up, and a burst of color brightened her face. For the first time since I'd met her in the factory, she looked like she had when I was a kid: strong, self-possessed, even vaguely elegant if you looked at her the right way. She stood taller, held her shoulders straighter, drew each breath with less effort than before. It was with newly clear eyes that she turned to her ship's dashboard, her fingers flying over the panels.

"Little Earth monsters," she hissed to herself as the onboard computer hummed to life. "Putting their filthy hands all over my ship. What has that Dib-slime done to you?" She spoke to the ship like she sometimes spoke to Mimi – more tenderly than she'd ever spoken to me. "In here getting his human-stench all over your cockpit, screwing up your systems—trying to infect you with his horrid brain—the _atrocities_ he's put you through."

While she dug through the computer's records discovering every "adventure" Dib had embarked on with her ship, I stood against the wall watching her, the soda can slowly thawing against my skin. When my cheek was sufficiently numb, I popped the tab and took a sip. As if bidden by the noise, Tak glanced up.

"Does she fly?"

I nodded. "There are a couple of wires near the back you have to fiddle with to get it going. Dib never could figure it out."

She stared at me for a second. "But _you_…" Cutting herself off with a shake of her head, she dove back into the display on the dash, and didn't look up at me again.

So I left her there to do what she had to, going inside to nuke some frozen pizza and try not to think about what would happen now. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the wall, chewing on a tasteless triangle of gloppy cheese and pepperoni, and pictured going back to my life without her: perfectly acceptable before she'd shown up a few short months ago, all but inconceivable now. What would I _do_, I found myself wondering, without her around to make things interesting? What had I done before?

Played video games. Drank soda. Sweet- (and dirty-) talked interchangeable chicks out of their interchangeable panties. Eaten tasteless triangles of gloppy cheese and pepperoni. Who the fuck _cared_? I raked my fingers through my hair and cradled my head in my hands, blinking down at the table. I'd never counted on meeting anyone who could hold my attention more than a month – but now that I had, it was ruining my goddamn life.

When I returned to the garage, she was sitting back in the cockpit, her flurry of activity having momentarily ceased. Apparently she'd stored more than fuel in her little secret compartment, because she was sucking absently on a stick coated in Irken Fun Dip, and I almost smiled to see it before I remembered I had nothing to smile about. Still, I climbed into the cockpit with her, and she allowed that – or at least, she didn't bitchslap me again.

I looked down at the dash display to see it glowing what was probably an auspicious shade of pink, blinking with scrolling readouts written in Irken letters. Of course, I couldn't make sense of them, but I imagined they read something like _activating GTFO mode. Blowing this popsicle stand in 3…2…1…_

"I don't understand," she said quietly, staring down at the dashboard. "Did you _want_ me to die?"

"I wanted you to stay."

She let out a long, shuddering breath. Then, with a sharp shake of her head, she snapped, "Well, I'm leaving. Tonight."

I rolled that thought around in my mind, like rolling a wad of gum around on my tongue. _Leaving. _All of a sudden, I liked the sound of that. "I'm coming with you," I said, and the second I said it, it felt right.

She sort of choked on a laugh. "No, you're not."

"Why not?"

"Why do you think? I finally have a chance at getting off this stinking planet. Why on Irk would I want to drag a piece of it with me?"

"Because I'm more than just _a piece of this stinking planet_, and you know it." My fingers rose to brush her left antenna. She growled and smacked my hand away, harder than she'd ever had the strength to before. "I mean, I know you're pissed at me right now, and that's fine. But if you leave me here, sooner or later you're going to miss me. I guarantee it."

"Well, you're a self-important little beast, aren't you?"

"Yeah, but I'm right. Aren't I?" Again, my fingers twined themselves through the spiral of her antenna, my thumb rubbing the smoothest part on the outside, the tip of my index finger following the coil. I leaned in so that, when I whispered, she could feel my breath warming her skin.

"You know you're never going to find anyone else who makes you feel like I do. You can search a thousand galaxies and you'll know it's true. Maybe you don't like it, maybe you won't admit it, but something changes in you when I touch you, something you can't explain. As smart as you are, you can't explain why you melt inside when I kiss you, and it drives you crazy, doesn't it?

"I'm not wild about being used, Sticky Tak. And if you were just hanging around to get off with me, only to dump me as soon as you find something better to do—well, I'd feel awfully _used_, now, wouldn't I?"

"Well, that's a liberal interpretation of events," she muttered, deliberately avoiding my eyes. "And I fail to see why your having learned to manipulate my nervous system is reason enough for me to want to saddle myself with you for the foreseeable future."

"So maybe that's not enough. Maybe you should take me with you because you owe me – because I spared your life and Mimi's, even after you tried to kill me. Because I took you in when I didn't have to, because I was nice to you when I didn't have to be. Because in the end, I _did_ bring you to your ship before it was too late."

I gave her antenna a jerk, so that she shrieked and whipped around to yell at me. Before she could, I stopped her short, arresting her eyes with mine – seizing the chance to _make_ her look at me, finally, and acknowledge exactly what we were facing here. If she was really going to tell me she never wanted to see me again, she had damn well better look me in the eye.

"Or maybe you should take me with you because, just like you said that day in the factory, I'm the first person you've met in a long time who's actually a match for you. Because I'm a _worthy opponent _and you respect me for that, much as you wish you didn't have to.

"The way I see it, neither of us are ever going to find someone as infuriating, as challenging, or as _fascinating—_" I let my voice drop a little on that word, drew it out a little longer than the others, and color rushed to her cheeks "—as the other. So either we stick together, or we spend the rest of our lives going slowly insane around people like Dib and Zim."

I saw her throat move as she swallowed, her gaze drifting slowly away from mine, and knew what I'd said hadn't fallen on deaf ears (did she even have ears?). She wasn't the only one who could give a good speech. "My ship isn't a passenger vessel," she said after a moment. "There won't be any room."

"I'll squeeze."

She pressed her lips together. "What would you eat? There aren't exactly Deelishus Weenie stands in space, you know."

"_Yes_, I know. Are you accusing me of being unadaptable?"

Another moment passed and her eyes flicked back up to mine, doing their best to communicate the utmost gravity. "I don't think you understand the implications of your proposition, child. I'm not coming back to Earth. Not _ever._ If you come with me, you'll be losing _everything_ you've ever known or loved—forever."

"Yeah, so? Bloaty's is closed. You broke my Game Slave. There's nothing left for me here." I shrugged. "And space _has_ to be more interesting than school."

She sighed. Not so much a resigned sigh, a _look-what-I-have-to-put-up-with_ sigh, but a _might-as-well_ sigh, a _what-the-hell _sigh – a sigh as good as the _clang_ of the bell on a test-your-strength game at the amusement park, in that I knew it meant my swing had hit home, and I'd won. "Whatever. Come, if you must. But you should know that if you irritate me, I _will_ throw you out the airlock."

"I can live with that." Energized by the prospect of having something to _do_ for once – of getting out of this crapsack town, of permanently ditching Dib, of having another day or a thousand to listen to her purr when I petted her and come up with puns on her name – I hopped out of her ship, straightened my skirt, and headed for the door to the house. "I should probably pack some stuff, though, if we're going tonight."

"Not too much stuff. This isn't a caravan."

"I know, I know. I'll just bring my backpack." Something about that struck me as funny – the idea of loading up my backpack, like I did every day before school, to take into frickin' space. The idea of packing up some clothes and my toothbrush, like I would to crash at a girl's house, to last me for God knew how many years. "I ought to tell Dad, too, I guess. And Dib."

"Yes." Her voice went suddenly silky with menace. I glanced over my shoulder to see her lips curling downwards, her spider-legs emerging to hoist her out of the cockpit. "There are a few things I'd like to tell Dib, as well."


	10. Blowing This Popsicle Stand

**9. Blowing This Popsicle Stand**

"So I just thought you should know that I've got a new girlfriend. And she's kind of an alien, and she's taking me with her to…I'm not really sure where. But anyway, I'm leaving forever, so I figured I'd come down and say goodbye."

Dad didn't even turn around. "Have a good time, honey!" he bellowed, over the cacophony of shrieks and zaps suddenly bursting from his worktable. "Don't forget to brush your teeth!"

"I won't, Dad. See you around."

Having done that, I left the lab and headed upstairs into the living room, and from there up to my room. Tak and Mimi were in the garage, making a few final adjustments to ensure her ship was flightworthy, which left me to an arguably even more difficult task: deciding what, in a room eight times the size of her cockpit, I absolutely needed to bring. What I would need, what I might want, what I would have to flip deuces for the last time.

To the third category, I consigned almost everything I owned: my books, my magazines, my posters and figurines. My zombie unicorn statuette. My army of guardian plushies, laser-loaded eyes staring diligently down from every surface in my room. Most of the makeup scattered across my dresser, and most of the clothes in its drawers. Figuring Tak's first priority wasn't equipping her ship with universal outlets, I said sayonara to my laptop and my iPod, sparing them the undignified demise of running out of juice somewhere between here and the Milky Way.

Into my backpack, I stuffed a pair of jeans, a pair of black-and-white-striped tights, my favorite skirt, my nightshirt, a T-shirt, a tank top and a sweater, plus a small armful of underwear. That took up the biggest compartment, so I put the smaller stuff in one of the outside pouches: my hairbrush, a tube of lipstick, an eyeliner pencil, a few hair ties and a travel packet of tissues (what for? I wasn't sure, but hey, you can always use a travel packet of tissues).

Having raided the kitchen earlier that day, I filled the remaining space with snacks, sodas, and water bottles (all of which I had already promised not to whip out without warning), figuring they would tide me over until I learned to stomach the fruits of the universe.

And other than that—what? My toothbrush and shower stuff would be fairly useless, with no more water than I could drink in a few days; I had to assume that, if Tak was as _superior _a being as she said she was, she'd have some other way of getting clean. Preferably a way that didn't melt human skin.

It was a safe bet my phone wouldn't get service outside Earth's atmosphere. If I'd had a mom, she'd probably have been hovering around telling me to pack a coat and stuff like that – but number one, I didn't, and number two, if I didn't even know where we were going, how was I supposed to know if it'd be cold there?

Thus, with my life from now on slung over my shoulder, I closed my door for the last time, and traipsed back down the stairs to the garage.

"Ready?" I said, tossing my backpack into what was, I guess, the cabin of her ship – the space between the cockpit and the rear storage panels, which would fit exactly me and Mimi and not a molecule more.

"Ready." Tak climbed out of the cockpit on her spider-legs, an unpleasant gleam in her eyes. "Let's go have a word with Dib."

Together, we went back upstairs, Tak nearly outpacing me on her spider-legs. I knocked on his door. "Dib, get your ass out here!" I hollered. "I need to talk to you!"

"Okay, okay," I heard him grumble from inside. "Just give me a…"

When he opened the door, his griping faded midsentence, his mouth hanging open and his eyes going wide. I could almost hear the gears in his giant head clicking as he struggled to process what was going on, reconciling what his eyes could see with what his brain couldn't believe.

Tak, of course, was more than happy to take advantage of his mental short. She shoved him back with her spider-legs and stalked into the room after him, backing him into the wall like she had me in the garage, looking more than ever like an honest-to-God spider chasing her prey into her web. When his head hit the wall, one of the limbs shot out and wrapped itself around his neck, squeezing until his face turned blue.

I leaned against his doorframe. "For fuck's sake, Tak, don't _kill_ him," I sighed, feeling that taking off with a dead body on our hands would be the wrong way to begin our little adventure.

"I'll do whatever I want to him!" she spat. But she did shoot me a glance over her shoulder, however narrow-eyed, and she loosened her grip to let him gasp for air. "I deserve to," she hissed as she turned back to Dib, more to him than to me. "You ought to die, you filthy thieving rat. You can't even comprehend how reprehensible you are. What you did—_what you did!_—if we were in Irken territory, you'd be executed for war crimes. Can you understand that, mud-sucking Earth ape?

"I pieced that ship together from the wreckage of planet _Dirt. _Built her, over _years_, with my own two hands. Did you think I nearly worked myself to death so that _you_ could vandalize and defile her, so that when I next climbed into the cockpit, she wouldn't even _know_ me anymore? Did you think I developed a state-of-the-art interface program so that you could vomit your disgusting brain cells into her drive?"

As he sputtered and flailed, she lifted him up by his neck and slammed him back into the wall, hard, her voice mounting from a snarl to a near-shout. "Or do you just have so little sense of _honor_, so little concept of _respect_, that you just suppose that the moment a person is _forcibly torn_ from her property, it's your right to begin using it to your own ends? Are you too much of a failure to understand that _some people_ actually create things of _worth_, and they don't want those things SPAT UPON by VERMIN LIKE YOU?!

"I SHOULD TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB, YOU BEASTLY LITTLE INGRATE!" she was shrieking at him now, dashing him against the wall like she thought he was a piñata. "I SHOULD DESTROY YOU LIKE YOU DESTROYED HER! THAT WOULD TEACH YOU TO—"

"All right," I said, sliding up behind her, elbowing her pak just so to make the limb constricting Dib's throat retract. Despite Tak's best efforts to keep the workings of her pak a secret, I'd learned through trial and error that a good sharp jolt to certain pseudo-pressure-points could be very helpful at times like this, when I really would've preferred she didn't outright murder my brother in a fit of rage. "That's enough of that."

"Unconscionable," she muttered as she backed off, still flaying Dib with her eyes. "Unforgivable. Even a newborn smeet would know—if there's one thing you _never_ do—it's like—it's like—" She growled under her breath. "There's no human crime vile enough to compare."

"Just cool off a minute, would you? I think you've made your point."

I had to admit I was a little surprised. I hadn't expected her to move on so quickly, from being angry at me for not telling her Dib had her ship to being angry at him for having it in the first place. I'd have liked to flatter myself by attributing that to my intentions being better (which they weren't, really; I never relished drawing parallels between Dib and I, but we'd both been as selfish as Bloaty's pizza was greasy), or to my having decided to tell her, or to her actually _liking_ me.

But listening to her ream him out, I realized I'd just landed on the safe side of her cultural priorities. Lying was one thing, I guess, but stealing someone else's ship was something any self-respecting Irken _just didn't do._ Sort of like rape for humans: the kind of crime that's intrinsically worse than any other, no matter what.

Not that I was complaining. Better Dib than me.

Having crashed to the floor when Tak let go of him, he sat gasping and coughing against the wall, rubbing his neck where she'd near-strangled him. "Where did _she_ come from?" he finally choked out, his eyes rolling up to meet mine.

"The lemon factory in the industrial district," I said. "But that's neither here nor there. I came up here to tell you we're leaving tonight – as soon as we're done here, actually – and you'd better not mess with my stuff while I'm gone, because I set my dolls to Kill Mode and they'll fry you if you do."

"Leaving?" he said hoarsely, confused. "Leaving for where?"

I shrugged. "Fuck if I know."

"With _her_?"

"It would seem that way, wouldn't it?"

"_Why_?"

"Isn't that the million-dollar question. Anyway, at least now you'll be able to park your car in the garage." Figuring that was about all there was to say, I motioned to Tak and we turned to head back out into the hall, her still fuming and skulking around on her spider-legs, me calling over my shoulder, "If we run into Mars, we'll send it back your way, 'kay?"

"Wait!" Suddenly, I felt him grab my arm, and whirled around to see him blinking helplessly at me. "I don't understand," he said, still a little breathless, as I jerked my arm out of his grip. "What's going on?"

I sighed. "Look, Dib. Is it really going to make you feel any better to know you and Zim are such idiots that Tak came after me, for being the only one who actually did anything to screw up her plan when we were kids? Is it really going to make you feel any better to know that it's a damn good thing she did, because I'm the only one who'd have stood a chance against her even laid low like she was, or that she's been living across the hall from you for a couple of months now?"

As his eyes grew wide – a little more so with each blow I dealt – I lifted my eyebrows and my hands, backing, palms-up, out of the room. "I didn't think so."

We were back down in the garage before he poked his big head in again, still looking as shell-shocked as a carnival goldfish dumped into the sea. "So you're just…what?" he said, as Tak hopped into the cockpit to initiate launch procedures. "Taking off? Into _space_? Just like that?"

"That's what I said. How many times do I have to explain it to you?"

"And you're taking the ship."

"No, we're taking a hot-air balloon." I rolled my eyes. "_Yes_, we're taking the ship. You got a problem with that?"

"Well, it's just that it seems a little unfair," he said, sounding sort of wounded, casting her ship a wistful gaze, "after everything I—"

Before he could finish the thought, a blast from the ship's laser cannon clipped his ear on its way into the wall, leaving a melon-sized hole burnt clean through to the kitchen and the tang of singed skin wafting through the air. "Another word," Tak snapped from the cockpit, glowering, "and that's your gargantuan head."

Apparently realizing the foolishness of directing it at her, Dib frowned at me, and again, I raised my eyebrows. "You did know, didn't you?" he said. "What you did to make it fly, back when we were kids."

"So what if I did?"

"So you _knew_, all this time, and you never showed me."

"I figured you didn't need any more opportunities to get yourself into trouble." By then, I was more than tired of going through his with him, and beginning to regret having told him we were going. "Can we go already?" I said to Tak over my shoulder, taking a few steps back in the hope that he wouldn't try to stop me. "I think I'm starting to understand what you meant by 'the sickening stench of humanity.'"

No such luck. "Are you coming back?" Dib said, the question as good as a lasso – or maybe a noose – around my neck.

"Not planning to."

"So…this is the last time I'll ever see you."

"Yup."

We stood there staring at each other a moment, our feelings surely entirely inappropriate for a brother and sister saying goodbye forever. I wasn't feeling bad for him, or trying to memorize his face, or remembering all of the good times we'd (never) shared, and I'm pretty sure he wasn't anticipating missing me.

More likely, he was equal parts pissed we were swiping his (least-promising, mostly-abandoned, yet somehow still important) project, and jealous that I was about to live the dream I'd never even had. Still, we took one last look at each other, for what I guess was ceremony's sake.

_Look at it, Gaz. We've only seen what's come to us from up there. Don't you want to fly out there and see it all? _

He shook his head slowly, deflated. "I can't believe that _you_…are…"

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Life's a bitch."

With that, I turned my back on him and climbed into Tak's ship, next to Mimi in the space behind the cockpit. I could feel the hum, the heat of the engine under and all around me, like and yet completely different from when I'd last felt it six years ago. I heard the windshield _whrr_ as it lowered, and the laser cannon _click_ as Tak reset its trajectory.

Then, without warning – without my having thought to glance once more around the garage, already a world away through her windshield, or at Dib standing dejectedly in the doorway – she hit the trigger, vaporized the garage roof, and pealed out through a column of smoke.

Before I knew it, the ground was a dizzying distance below us, and growing farther with every second. For the first minute – while I could still see the Earth receding, the houses and towns and forests and oceans blending together like fingerpaints, a million once-brilliant colors swirling into greenish-brown – I pressed my face to the glass, watching our ascent.

But soon enough it was all stars, and endless, dream-filled night. Soon enough there was nothing left to see, but a turquoise speck I could almost flick off the windshield, and that was when I turned around – turned and saw Mimi, perched on the back of the pilot's chair, looking happier than a popped toaster amid her sister tech. I watched her watch Tak, her face lit by the dash display, her eyes reflecting the possible courses scrolling by on the screen. All the places we could go. All the great and terrible things we could do.

Not that I could read Irken any better than I could earlier that day. I just knew instinctively, and my instincts were always right.


	11. Lessons Learned

Little warning: As of the next chapter, this story's rating will change to M, for TELL ME WHAT'S NEXT ALIEN SEX (reference? reference? anyone?)

**10. Lessons Learned**

Thus began the first chapter of My Life in Space (With My Alien Girlfriend and Her Robot Cat). Shit. Who would've thought?

We lived as nomads, for a long time, because we really had nowhere to go. Having failed to 'prove her worthiness as an invader', Tak couldn't go home. If she showed her face in Irken territory, it'd mean a one-way ticket back to planet Dirt, and I was definitely not okay with tagging along for that.

So we amused ourselves zipping around from here to there, touching down wherever looked interesting and leaving when we'd seen all there was to see. Moons were good for that sort of thing, as were the smaller, less-colonized planets, and we'd often pinball through a solar system spending each night somewhere new.

And we did stop every night, or most nights, or what passed for nights. Maybe she didn't need to sleep, but I did, and I refused to be constantly waking up squished between the storage panels and the cockpit, cracking my neck and popping my back and still feeling like the filling in a sushi roll.

Besides, sleep or no, I had to get _out_ of there now and then. The space and a chance to stretch was good for both of us, so I made Tak stop whenever I decided it felt like night; she bitched and growled and threatened to throw me out the airlock, but she always took us down in the end.

She'd switch on the landing gears and retract the windshield, and Mimi would hop out and march around observing things, and I would head off (clad in the appropriate space-gear) to wander through a fluorescent forest or poke through the wreckage of a downed ship or sled down a crater on a piece torn from said wreckage, and Tak would stick around her ship getting her OCD on, updating systems that were functioning perfectly, making repairs and adjustments that didn't need to be made.

So inevitably, I'd have to go back and grab her, to ask her what that thing with the sixty eyes was doing up in that cave, or show her a geyser spitting rainbows that ate through my shoes, or plunk her down on a makeshift sled and give her a shove before she could scramble off.

Or else I would just drag her somewhere quiet, to sit and watch whatever skyline the planet presented us with, and to talk. About anything, about nothing. It didn't matter, so long as it got her out of her _I'm-a-trained-soldier_ mindset, and let the _just-frickin'-relax-already _brain waves in.

Eventually, we strolled back to the ship to make camp for the night. Mimi would curl up in the cockpit, set to Standby so that she'd take down any other world-wanderers who tried to mess with Tak's baby, and Tak would pull out something she called an environmental projector: a silver sphere the size of a golf ball, that created a dome into which any image could be projected and under which any atmosphere could be reproduced. It gave us somewhere dark to spread our bedrolls, even when it was light outside, and the promise of privacy.

As we had on Earth, we developed a routine. She would close the dome, encasing us in a canopy of artificial night. I would flop down on my bedroll, beckon her over, and corral her as quickly as I could, wrapping my arms around her and spooning up to her back. I had to, lest she think of something else she could or would or should be doing, and slip out to become the neurotic elf to my cobbler.

I would hold her like that awhile, nestled against her, breathing her in (the closer she let me get to her, the longer she let me stay, the more I realized her skin smelled like her mouth tasted – cardamom and smoke), stroking her antennae until her muscles liquefied. Until she was singing her little song for me, and she was ready to let me turn her over and crack her open like a wishbone.

And I would kiss her, and kiss her, and slide my arm around her shoulders and kiss her, and roll over on top of her and kiss her, and she would kiss me back, a little bit, before we came slowly unglued. And then I'd sleep, but not before I could tell she'd drifted off first.

As our wandering-days wandered on, I even managed to drag a few sounds out of her. It used to be she'd stay as silent as she could, while I kissed her, but soon enough I discovered what I could do to make her sigh. And when she did, and I could feel the _fucking-loving-this _waves crashing over her, it gave me a better buzz than a whole twelve-pack of soda.

But that time wasn't all love-nesting with Tak. I mean, I _learned _things. I was a frickin' intergalactic citizen now.

One day, about a week after we'd left Earth, we were trekking through a jungle on a planet called Glarp – me blazing the trail, Tak rolling her eyes halfway out of her head behind me, and Mimi tree-hopping like Tarzan above us. "Exactly _what_ was it you said you saw?" Tak groaned.

"Lights. Up there." I reached into the brush on either side of us and snapped off a long purple branch, swinging it straight ahead. "Like the northern lights, only more…space-y."

"Space-y," she said dryly. "Beautiful."

"Don't roll your eyes too hard, Sticky. They'll fall out."

A moment later, I heard a rustle and a crash and a_ clang_ behind me, and Tak's deeply distinctive shriek. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw her wriggling out from under a heap of purple branches and glowing leaf rot, Mimi splayed sheepishly atop it. "Filthy, uncivilized wilderness worlds," Tak grumbled as she got to her feet, dusting herself off. "Why is this wasteland of a planet even here? If I were in charge of the Armada, dumps like this would be the first places I'd vaporize."

"Really? I'd have thought you'd fill them with snacks."

I could feel her glare boring into the back of my head. "Next time, _I'm_ picking where we stop."

"Yeah? How about a nice ski resort planet? Or a beach planet – I could use a shrimp cocktail by the pool."

I heard her whip a laser out of her pak to waste a low-flying bug (Glarpenoid bugs being best described as mosquito-Pekingese crossbreeds with transparent exoskeletons and fangs). "At this point, I'd take a planet of rusty nails over this."

We had to round a few more bends and scale a few more boulders, and at one point my walking-stick bit me and skittered away. But eventually, we stumbled onto the source of the glow I'd seen from our campsite: a massive, silvery-barked tree, its canopy throbbing with multicolored light, and its branches dripping with bunches of blue fruit.

"Hey, sweet," I said as we approached it, taking in the roots thick as subway trains bursting out of the ground, the crevices tunneling deep into the trunk. "I bet there's a whole bunch of shit living in this thing."

Tak kept her distance, folding her arms and scowling up at the tree. "All the more reason to get out of here before it comes out and finds us."

Ignoring her, I headed for the spot where my hunch was calling me, a crotch between two smaller roots that I could use as a step. With the crags in the bark as hand- and foot-holds, I began climbing the trunk of the tree.

Mimi, propelled by her jets, zipped up to the lowest-hanging branch ahead of me, and flung her cable back down. I grabbed hold of it and rode it up into the canopy, greeting Mimi with a fist bump (from beaning the thing with a statuette to teaching her how to pound it – talk about your blossoming relationships) when I joined her on her perch.

"Mimi!" Tak howled despondently from the forest floor. "Don't _encourage_ her!"

Mimi's shoulder-joints _zzt_ed as she shrugged and leapt up onto a higher branch, and I headed further out on the one where I stood. It was huge at first, so that I could walk without wavering, but grew narrower as it radiated out. By the time I reached the end, I was balancing like a tight-rope walker, then scooting along straddling the branch at the part where it split into fingers.

There was where the fruit hung, in dewy, smooth-skinned clusters. Each was the size and shape of an eggplant, but when I plucked one from its stem, it was soft like a ripe peach – and after a week of rationing the chips and cheese balls in my backpack, they looked more than appealing.

"What do you think you're doing?" No sooner had I bitten into the blue fruit than Tak popped out her spider-legs, clambering up the tree and down the branch in time to snatch it away before I swallowed. "Are you that stupid, child?" she snapped. "You don't know what this thing is! For all we know, it could kill you!"

I gulped down the fruit flesh in my mouth and smacked my lips, tasting sweetness, a little bit of citrus. Maybe mango? Cantaloupe? Whatever it resembled, it was delicious. Wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve, I shot Tak a grin, and said, "How sweet. Are you saying you'd care if I died?"

"What I'm _saying_ is, don't blame me if you start bleeding from every orifice!"

"But it's _good_." I craned forward and took her face in my hands. "Here, taste."

I kissed her hard and felt her color, her cheeks warming against mine before she jerked away, deep green. She was getting better all the time about letting me love her up in private, but outside the dome – even if there was nobody else around to see us, save a Glarpenoid bug buzzing by – my _courtship rituals_ made her twitchy, and I had to admit she was cute when she got flustered.

In any case, it had been a pretty lucky hunch, because I tromped back to camp with my arms full of the fruit from the silver tree, and persuaded Tak to let me stick it in one of her storage pods. After that, I came into a windfall of edible treasures, or at least scavenged enough to keep from starving.

Whether it was pebbles you could crack and eat the insides, or roots you could chew on for days before they went dry, or these little snail things that squealed when you bit into them but tasted – swear to God – like teriyaki chicken, I found food near everywhere we went. I even managed to find substitutes for water, mostly by sucking the juice out of fruits like the ones on Glarp.

Not that interplanetary foraging was the only trick I picked up. When I ran out of clean clothes, I learned how to use Tak's magic space washing machine (which she insisted was _not_ a magic space washing machine, but something else with a name way too long to remember, involving particles and frequencies and microlasers and lots of interjected snark about how _primitive_ it was to rely on water and chemicals to eliminate bacteria). And when I ran low on clean…ness, in general, I learned how to take a magic space shower, which more or less entailed zapping myself with the handheld component of her magic space washing machine.

I also learned how to be a badass space mofo, which was much more exciting than using a magic space washing machine and taking a magic space shower combined. Turns out chores in space are just as boring as chores on Earth, no matter how many lasers they involve.

"MIMI! Man the laser cannon! They're gaining!"

We had our share of epic space battles, which would've been cool if Tak had let me actually _do _anything. Instead, as soon as trouble threatened, she'd start yelling commands to Mimi and barking at me to get out of her way. Thus, I spent the action sequences of my life glowering at the back of Tak's head, scrunched in a corner of her ship.

"Keep on them! Don't let them get ahead of us!"

On one particular occasion, we were trying to outrun a couple of ugly slime guys we'd encountered on a moon of planet Rax – supposedly nothing but the ruins of several long-dead colonies, apparently home to some very unfriendly squatters. Unsatisfied with chasing us off their turf, they were coming up on us in a spade-shaped cruiser, pelting us with lasers faster than Tak could retaliate.

"We'll show these scum-sucking worms what's wha—_MIMI_! How many times have I got to tell you, _keep on them_!"

_This is getting us nowhere. _I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Skulking up into the cockpit (I couldn't even stand up in her ship, so I couldn't say I was walking – more like scooting the few feet from my time-out corner to the pilot's chair), I glanced at her rear viewscreen, watching Mimi fire blast after blast at the squatters to no avail. Mimi was a good marksman, but their ship's design – like a manta ray, nearly flat from nose to tail – meant she didn't have much to aim at, and the shots that came close, they dodged.

"I thought I told you to stay in the back!" Tak snapped when she noticed me. "Can't you see I'm _busy_ up here?"

"Busy doing what? Getting us mowed down by a pair of Swamp Things?" She swept her hand across the control panel and we zigzagged quickly from right to left, swerving past a volley from the squatters. I found myself flung against the glass, then against her chair, and when I was sitting up again – wobbling like a bobblehead, maybe, but sitting up – I fixed her with a frown. "This isn't working, Tak."

"Really?" she said from between grit teeth. "What was your first clue?"

"We can't outrun them. And you can have Mimi drain the cannon trying, but you're not going to hit them this way." I elbowed her. "Let me try."

"This isn't the time for jokes."

"I'm serious. I bet I can do it better than you."

"Yeah, and you can get us killed better than I can, too."

I felt a growl rising in my throat, my hands itching to just shove her out of her seat. "Come on, I've played this game before! I can win!"

Suddenly, an incoming blast filled her viewscreen with bright white, and she lunged to hit the key that would take us out of its range. The ship swung downwards just in time, but sent her flying up, shrieking, and smacking into the windshield; rather unsympathetically, I took the opportunity to slide into her seat.

Keeping us riding a steady course ahead of the squatters, I searched the dash display for an icon that looked promising for my purposes, knowing what I wanted to do but unsure of how to do it. Tak, having tumbled down the windshield like one of those gummy octopi_, _scrambled to her feet and began trying to pry me from her seat. "WHAT ON IRK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" she screeched into my ear. "_I TOLD YOU_ TO STAY AWAY FROM—"

With one hand, I grabbed both of her antennae halfway down, yanked them up over her head, and pinned her to the dash; with the other, I found and activated the weapon I was looking for. The ship jolted as I fired a tow cable from its rear port, sending it and the three-pronged grappling hook welded to the end of it flying towards the squatters. On its first swipe, it only scratched the surface of the ship, the hook's prongs dragging across one wing before whipping out into space.

"I told you!" Tak growled, clawing at my fist with her hands and her spider-legs, trying to wrench herself free. "You're only going to egg them on!"

I reeled the cable back in and took another shot. This time, the hook landed squarely on the nose of the squatters' ship, and I could feel the cable snap tight. The resistance eased when they hit their boosters, surging up behind us, no doubt thinking I'd just opened us up to let them steamroll us straight into an oncoming moon.

No doubt Tak thought so, too. "YOUTHICKHEADEDCAVEMONKEYTHEY 'REGOINGTORAMUSINTOOBLIVIONAN DALLTHANKSTOYOURINSOLENCEICA N'TBELIEVEI—"

"MIMI, NOW!"

When I yelled, Mimi let loose the biggest blast the laser cannon could deliver. I hit the button to reel the cable in, and pulled back on the throttle as hard as I could. Instantly, Tak's ship jerked to a stop. The squatters, rocketing towards us at about a kajillion light-years a second, could only watch themselves collide with the cannon's beam. And I watched, through the viewscreen, as its force ripped through their cruiser and left it half-crumpled, half-fried, sputtering along still tethered to our cable, squashed from a manta ray into a banana.

Wordlessly, I let Tak go, and she straightened up too stunned even to snarl at me for bending her antennae. "Well done," she said, after a moment spent staring at the viewscreen. It was probably the nicest thing she'd ever said to me.

When she regained her composure, she brought her ship around to face (what remained of) the squatters', and via a speaker she produced from the dash, screamed at them for about five solid minutes in a language I definitely didn't speak. Then, her fingers dancing over the cable's controls, she wound it up like a pitcher's arm and chucked the squatters into a nearby field of asteroids, and we were back on track.

"That language you spoke to them," I said once we'd sailed along awhile, side-by-side in the cockpit – me basking in my own awesomeness, Tak silent in the pilot's chair. "Was it Irken?"

"Yes."

"But they weren't."

"No, thank the mythological divinity of your choice."

"So why would you assume they speak it?"

"For the same reason you'd assume most people on Earth speak English." A note of pride crept into her voice. It occurred to me that, for someone who'd been effectively expatriated from the Irken Empire, she sure thought highly of it. "We are the dominant race in the universe," she said with a haughty sniff, "so it makes sense that our language would be the dominant tongue."

I leered at her, slurping up a nice wet kiss on one side of her head. "I'll show you a dominant tongue."

"Eugh! Why is it that everything I say, no matter how innocuous, somehow prompts you to attempt to infect me with your revolting human germs?"

"I don't know. I guess I'm just romantic like that." My hand drifted over to caress the kink in her left antenna where I'd grabbed it, smoothing out the crease with my thumb as my thoughts brewed. She stiffened a little, automatically, but didn't shove me off. "You should teach me."

"Teach you what? How to be less irritating?"

"Teach me to speak Irken."

She snorted. "Ha! That's funny. You're amusing, child."

"Why not? I mean, I'd like to know what you're saying when you're cussing out slime dudes who just got their drippy asses handed to them." I raised my eyebrows. "And if I could read the letters on your dash display, I'd have found that cable a lot faster."

She looked at me uncertainly, almost uncomfortably. "I wouldn't know where to start," she hedged. "I never actually _learned_ myself. I've known my mother tongue since the day I was born—it's all embedded in the pak."

"Okay, fine. But if I asked you how to say—oh, I don't know, 'thick-headed cave monkey'—in Irken, you could tell me, couldn't you?"

"Well, I—yes. I suppose I could."

"So teach me, then." I grinned and wound the swirl in her antenna around my index finger, tugging gently. "And when we're done with that, you can teach me how to speak British."

"_What?_"

Pursing my lips, tilting my head to one side, I wondered if we'd really never talked about this before. It seemed like something I had always meant to bring up. "When you speak English, you speak it with a British accent. Did you not know that?"

"I suppose I never gave it much thought."

"Well, I've always wondered how you came by it. I mean, God knows Zim never had one."

Naturally, I started cracking up just thinking about that, and Tak rolled her eyes. "When Irkens learn a language," she explained, "we learn it by assimilating it into our speech systems, based on the first sample we're exposed to – the first time we ever hear it used. If I speak English with an accent, it's because the first human I heard speaking English spoke it with that accent, though obviously I didn't know that at the time. It's not especially exciting."

"Maybe not," I said, my lips curling at their corners in a smile. "But I've always thought it was kind of sexy."

Her cheeks darkened. "There's no Irken word for _sexy_, you know."

"Then we'll just have to make one up."


	12. The Anglerfish Forest

This scene is pretty explicit, hence the jump to the M rating, but please don't think this story is going to degenerate into an all-out alien pornfest. This is actually the only sex scene there's going to be for...well, maybe ever. As you'll find out, it's included only because it's essential to the plot, which come next chapter kicks into high gear.

**11. The Anglerfish Forest**

Of course, there was one thing I wanted to learn more than any other. The question I'd been asking myself since she'd come to my room to get Mimi, (what seemed) innumerable months ago. I lost track of time during our travels, as days and nights became less inalterable axes on which my world turned, more arbitrary conditions with little bearing on anything we actually did—but we hadn't been gone from Earth too long when I determined to get an answer.

We were camping on a planet called Shrith, and my wanderings had taken me to a forest far more welcoming than the ones on Glarp. For starters, I didn't have to hack through a bunch of underbrush; as soon as I came upon the forest, I'd come upon a path winding through the trees, a good three feet across and dusted with shimmery white sand. No native life inhabited it, from what I could see. It was cool there, but not cold, and the air was thick with silence.

Most intriguing, though, was the canopy. The trees were nondescript (spindly and metallic indigo, but for space trees, nondescript), but what hung from their branches was like no leaf I'd yet seen: a veil of swaying blue pendants, each glowing like an anglerfish's light.

I reached up to pass my hand through a low-hanging cluster, and, catching one between my fingers, found it smooth and warm and pulsing. As far as I could see down the path, they glittered in a thousand shades of blue, every so often bobbing in a phantom breeze.

The longer I stayed in the blue forest, staring up at the glowing canopy, the more I realized that it had a curious effect. I didn't know if it was a chemical that had come off on my hands or a vapor they gave off into the air or if I was just hypnotizing myself by looking at them too long, but the dangling lights on those trees were strangely calming.

Not that I'd been agitated before. It wasn't a rational relaxation they induced, but physical, sort of subconscious – I might not even have noticed it, if I hadn't been alone and thinking about these things. My mind was as sharp as ever, but my body felt perfectly content not to go anywhere for awhile, my senses flowering to take in the world around me.

I figured that was about as close as we'd come to a romantic environment. And I figured it was about time.

So when I went back to find Tak, and detach her from whatever excuse she'd found to putter around the ship, I took her with me back to the anglerfish forest. "Isn't this place cool?" I said as we started down the path, the trees that flanked its entrance melding seamlessly behind us.

She shot a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder. "It would be cooler if I were sure we could get out."

"Don't flip, the trees just do that. They'll open again when we come back." I swept my arm through the bank of trees on my right. Sure enough, they parted obligingly to make room, then slid back into place when we walked on. "They're very accommodating."

"Mm." Tak blinked up at the pendant leaves, a hundred tiny points of light reflected in her eyes. "I guess it is sort of…pretty."

For awhile, we followed the path, unspeaking, drifting along in a sea of blue light. I could feel the calm coming over me, slowly; it trickled down my skin and seeped through my clothes as though poured from a pitcher, leaving me languorous, dreamy. One glance at Tak's flagging eyelids and I knew it wasn't just me.

We didn't tire, exactly, so much as we lost interest in moving – became immersed in the lights, the trees, the texture of the sand beneath our feet. _Why go any further,_ came our simultaneous thought, _when everything is so lovely here?_

"Let's sit down," I voiced it.

"Mm. Yes."

I flopped down against a tree (as ever sympathetic, it didn't move away, but shifted to support me) on the side of the path, kicking off my boots and pulling off my leggings. Tak sat beside me. For a minute or two, we just vegged, gazing up at the canopy – then I reached over, twined my fingers through the spiral of one of her antennae, and pulled her into a kiss.

She took a few perfunctory stabs at resistance, but it wasn't long before I had her pinned against a tree, raiding the stores of smoke and spice in her mouth. Feeling her shudder against me, the flutters of pleasure under her skin, the breathless little _nh_s and _um_s that resonated in her lips and tongue. I kissed her until she was practically dripping through my fingers, gone so soft I could've tied her in knots – and then, I let my hands begin to roam.

They slid from cradling her face, stroking her skin, down the length of the purple dress she always wore. I could feel her tense a little in confusion, but not enough to jerk away. It wasn't until I went lower, hiking the dress up to slip beneath it, that she shoved me off.

"Exactly what do you think you're doing?" she demanded – flustered, dazed, but not too far gone to shoot me a killer glare.

"Well, I think it's about time we got this over with. Don't you?"

Her frown deepened. "Look, I don't know – and I don't _want_ to know – what all you did when you lived on Earth, but you need to understand that the situation isn't the same here. Just because you've _bullied_ me into adapting to your courting rituals doesn't mean you can do the same with your mating rituals. I'm not Zara. I don't—_do that_."

I almost snorted at the familiarity of the speech. Not the first part, maybe – but before the first time I made her scream, April had sniffed _I don't _do _that_ in exactly the same tone of voice. "What makes you so sure?"

"I am under no obligation to explain my biology to you."

"Maybe not, but it would help. How do you _know_ you wouldn't like it if I touched you like I touched Zara? You didn't think it would feel good to let me touch your antennae, and God knows you do now."

She colored slightly. "That was different."

"How?"

"I just—I can't—" Wrestling with words she couldn't quite seem to spit out, she let out a hard huff and tightened her hands into fists, directing her scowl at the ground. "Irken young have been engineered in labs for _centuries_. We don't biologically reproduce. We don't _mate_, we're not—_sexual_."

"Sticky, I don't know shit about Irkens, but I know _you're_ sexual as anything. I can feel you tingling when I kiss you. You might not biologically reproduce, but you're chock-full of the chemicals that make you want to." My hand crept back over to her and tugged at the hem of her skirt, asking again to be let in. "Just let me try. It can't hurt to try, can it?"

"I don't care what you say," she snapped, smacking my hand away. "I am _not _letting you undress me."

"Then I won't. I'll just go treasure-hunting, see what I can find." I wiggled my fingers, grinning, and she groaned, apparently unappreciative of my metaphor. "Hey, if you're really asexual, what harm could it do? I'll come up empty-handed and you'll get to say _I told you so_, and I'll never bug you about it again.

"But if I don't satisfy my curiosity _now_…" I widened my eyes and pulled down the corners of my lips, looking at her meaningfully. "I'll be trying to molest you at every turn."

"Is this how you seduced all of your girlfriends? By threatening to badger them until they let you get in their pants?"

"No, just you." I leaned in and kissed her lightly, smiling against her lips. "'Cause you're _special_."

I went back to kissing her for awhile, letting her loosen up, get into a state of mind where it would be easier to let me in. Once I could feel her starting to thaw out again, my hand traveled to the hem of her dress; she stiffened unmistakably, but this time, she let it happen.

She let me push up her skirt and snake my hand under the waistband of her leggings, where I could feel skin gone untouched for years twitch at the sudden contact. The scales there took longer to retract than those above her collar, so I lingered for awhile, running my fingers up and down the silky plane of her lower torso.

Eventually, I ventured further, sliding my hand into the warm, almost velvety place between her legs. Right away, my instincts began to whisper in my ear. It didn't take me long to come across a sliver of skin that felt thinner than the rest, giving slightly when I rubbed my thumb over it – even less time to notice that it made Tak tremble. The longer I touched her there, the less resistance my fingers met, until the barrier stretched and sank like plastic wrap.

She broke away from the kiss wincing, her fingers curling and clawing my shirt at the shoulders. "What are you doing?" she sort of squeaked, squirming weakly against me. "That hurts!"

"I know. It won't in a second." I slipped my free arm around her to gather her against me, holding her still. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders, hid her face in the crook of my neck; I lowered my voice to a murmur and pressed my lips to her skin. "Trust me, okay? I have a feeling."

"Y-you don't know what you're talking about. I don't want to do this. I said it _hurts_!" She tensed and struggled, the clawed tips of her fingers digging into my neck. The pitch of her protests rose as I rubbed harder, pushing against that layer of skin – knowing, by now, that this was the gate that would have to be unlocked, and I'd only make it worse for her if I drew it out. "I can't—I can't—I can't—aaAAHn—!"

Suddenly, the pressure eased and her body let me in, let my fingers slide into the warmth and the wetness beyond the broken skin. She cried out, spasming, nearly choking me – but this time, there was a distinctly different timbre to the sound. "It hurts," she gasped into my shoulder, the words made slippery by a panting whine. I flicked my fingertips, explored her inside, and her knees buckled. "Idon'tknowwhatyoudidbutithurts. Ican'tIcan'tIcan't—_don't_—!"

"Are you sure it hurts?" I purred, all but tasting the good vibes radiating from her now. I'd popped enough cherries in three years to have this script memorized. "Or are you just saying that because you don't have words for how much you love it?"

"Uhmmm." I could feel her faculties leaving her, her eyes rolling back in her head and their lids flickering shut. Still listening to my hunch, I pushed two fingers in to the hilt, and curled them upwards to stroke a hot spot embedded in one of her walls, through which every system in her sweat-sheened body seemed to pulse. My reward was a redoubled slickness inside her, and a manifestly grateful gasp in my ear. "I don't…I don't understaaahnd…"

"Don't need to. Just enjoy it." By that point, she had gone completely limp in my lap, drained of every last ounce of tension save that which kept her arms locked around my neck. She shuddered, and I grinned. "Yeah?"

Fuck, did she ever enjoy it. She actually made me jealous; I couldn't remember the last time anything had felt so good. All I did was massage her a little and she was melting all over me, mumbling things I suspected would've been inarticulate even if I did speak Irken, grinding her hips into my hand.

She was loving it, loving it, loving it, and I was loving doing it to her – loving the way every rhythm in her body was spiking like crazy, the way her breath was steaming up my neck, the way her fingers strained balled around fistfuls of my shirt. Not to mention that by that point, she was _literally _dripping through my fingers, leaking honey like a smashed beehive. I savored knowing I'd be able to smell her on my hand for days.

"I can't…ummm…I cuuuhh…" I'd been around the block with a lot of girls, and they all had their pet phrases for screaming or moaning or gasping in bed. April's was _oh God. _Zara's was _fuck. _Tak's, apparently, was _I can't._ "_Listen_ to me, child!" she finally choked out. "I—I have to—I can't—"

"If you want to tell me something, you're going to have to be more intelligible than that."

"Notmyfault. Shutup." She groaned and shivered, comforting herself with what I guessed were Irken obscenities. "I need to…toaaahhnn…"

I eased up on her a little, slowing the motion of my fingers. "Would it be easier if I stopped?"

"No! Don'tstop." Shoving me with her hips as if to kick-start me like an engine, she resonated with an appreciative purr when the friction returned. I didn't know if she knew she was doing it, but I could feel her constricting inside, hugging my fingers as they entertained her sweet spot. "The crisis," she mumbled into my shirt, whether to herself or to me I wasn't sure.

"What?"

"The crisis. Like whenyouhaveafever and it…breaks." She shook with a sigh. "When…?"

"Ahh. You want to come." Cryptic little lima bean. I swear to God, she was the only person I knew who would talk about orgasm in terms of disease. "Don't worry, I'm going to get you there. If you don't claw me to ribbons first."

She made a sound half-stifled by my shoulder, the kind of thick-tongued _unh _I took to mean _no promises_, and made a point of not unhooking her claws from my shoulder blades. She was close, I knew, but I would have to push her over the edge.

Until then, all I'd really been doing was teasing her, moving gently and lightly and to no particular end. Now, I applied the remedy much more directly, working that wellspring of sensation a few inches up from her entrance until she was nearly deafening me with her cries. I felt her writhe under the weight of her warring instincts: one telling her to seek out the positive stimulus, the other telling her to fight the overload.

"I can't," she kept gasping, almost whimpering, even as she rocked her hips against my hand. "I can't—I can't—I caaAAH, mercy, child!"

"Yes, you can," I murmured. "Let it happen. Ride it out. Good girl."

Her breath, labored though it was, hitched in a knowing sniff. Buried in the crook of my neck, her face twitched with the effort of assembling a smirk. "You've done this before," she said, maybe having finally realized what that meant.

"Yeah." I pressed a kiss to her forehead. "But never quite like this."

She kept telling me she couldn't, she _couldn't_, right up until she did. Until she made the most incredible, inimitable noise, sort of a scream and a yowl and a squeal all wrapped up in one, and bucked hard against me, and convulsed. The next thing I knew, she'd turned to jelly in my lap, and something warm was running down my wrist.

I caressed her a moment longer – let her come down slow, floating instead of falling – then pulled my fingers gently out. Briefly, I wondered if the skin there would heal, and I'd have to break her open again the next time we did this. Hoped otherwise, but wondered.

I slid my wet fingers into my mouth and sucked them clean, detecting notes of something brewed and bottled and shelved for a long time, like the wine Zara and I used to swipe from Dad's dusty liquor cabinet. Sweeter than anything humans produced.

Tak lay curled up in my lap with her eyes closed, panting softly, still sticky with sweat. I smoothed her skirt and, as if with new eyes, blinked up at the canopy. I thought about how she'd always been so skittish about letting me kiss her outside the dome, for fear someone would see us, and about how funny it was that we'd done what we'd done where we did it. Here, in the anglerfish forest, where a thousand glowing eyes had seen everything.

I leaned down and, knowing she didn't have the energy to smack me, whispered, "I told you so."


	13. Symptomatic

Lalage: You're not wrong to have issues with the consent. It's not something I'll really have time to explore in great depth in-story, but I meant it to be uncomfortably ambiguous; when you have a character saying _I don't want to do this_ in the middle of a sex scene, how could it not be? Tak says no, Gaz doesn't listen, and just because I wrote it doesn't mean I think it's right. If any author out there thinks her characters are always right, she's probably writing Mary Sues.

And...thanks, but it's not a hymen, nor does Tak have a vagina. She's _Irken_, she doesn't have human genitalia – it's not called the same thing and it doesn't work the same way. To get a little gross (I would go into this in a PM if I could, but seeing as you're a guest, that's unfortunately not an option), the hymen only partially covers the vagina; you can still do things like insert a tampon without breaking it.

But the…uh…as-yet unnamed bit of tissue that Gaz broke in _The Anglerfish Forest _is a complete barrier to the Irken sexual organs – nothing goes in or out until it's torn. In its unbroken state, it made Tak effectively asexual.

…trust me, I wouldn't go into all this unless it were important.

**12. Symptomatic**

_Tak speaking_

I thought, _maybe if I ignore it, it'll stop._

Which wasn't like me. I'd never been one to avoid my obstacles; I didn't bury my head in the sand and sing _I can't see you if you can't see me. _I faced everything head-on and if I failed, I failed – and I'd been doing entirely too much failing recently – but at least I'd tried.

But when it began, I was so—_terrified_, so confused, that ignoring it was all I could do. I could see no recourse, devise no plan. When Zim had sent my life screeching off its tracks, I applied myself instantly to the task of finding them again; when I woke in the wreckage of my escape pod, all I could think about was exacting a similar pain from the agent of my defeat. I _knew_ what to do, even if it wasn't always easy to do it. But what was I to do now?

First off, there was the naiala grove, and what happened there. The child took me there, to the forest where the naiala – she called them _anglerfish trees_ – grew, and she broke me and came inside of me and made me act like an animal. She mocked me for thinking of it in terms of illness and injury, but wasn't that what it was?

She opened a wound in me (it _felt_ like a wound – like I ought to have salved and wrapped it – though it never closed and never bled, save for that strange sticky substance she said tasted of wine), she brought me to crisis, and from then on I suffered from an infection of the nerves. From then on, I was forever being blindsided by sudden rushes of desire—of sourceless, infuriating _need_—for the way she had made me feel that day, and obliged to return to her for more.

In that, she was generous. I came to her, however grudgingly, and she gave and gave until I spat _mercy_ and convulsed. She would use her fingers and sometimes her mouth, and sometimes other things. She devised several obscene uses for the vibrating buffer heads on my ship's cleaning hoses, and knocked me down and sat on me, straddling my waist, so as to test them.

And I fought and howled, mourning the indignities to which my ship was constantly exposed, trying to make her understand that _that doesn't go there!_ and lost that battle the same way I always did: in a drooling, twitching mess of sensation, begging her to let me feel those lovely feelings again. Defeat had never felt so good.

The problem was, though, that by that point I had a waist to straddle. And I'd never had one before.

I hadn't grown in years. _Centuries._ The last time I had grown I had grown very quickly, for a very short time, at the beginning of a very long life, and I didn't remember how it felt. So it was easy to ignore, at first. What difference does an inch make? Or two inches? Because that was how it happened—slowly. It wasn't as if I woke up one morning and found myself…changed.

I believe it was over the course of about a year, that I went from what I was to what I would become. A year of wandering through space with Mimi and Gaz, beholden to nothing and no one for the first and last time in my life. A year of denial stretched thinner and thinner, until the last threads were strangling us all.

The first thing I noticed was that things seemed further away. When I bent to pick something up, I would have to bend further; the dash of my ship seemed a greater distance from my eyes. Conversely, other things got closer – I had to tilt my head lower to address Mimi, but not as high to speak to Gaz. Things I'd once had to retrieve with my pak's limbs I could reach by standing on my toes. All of this, I could ignore.

It was at this point, though, that the child first brought it up. I suppose she was smart enough to realize before I did.

We'd made camp on planet Grakka, whose atmosphere she had discovered was conducive to certain human comforts. Specifically, she'd focused one of my ship's precision lasers through a bit of glass, and ignited a small pile of Grakkan vegetation. Thus, we spent the evening lolling about around a crackling campfire, watching the light throw shadows across each others' faces, and licks of flame vanish into the sky.

She narrowed her gaze at me from across the fire, eyeing me through a column of wavering hot air. "You look taller."

I frowned. "What?"

"You look taller. Have you grown?"

"Of course not," I said, with the sort of snort one reserves for addressing mad people. "You're delusional. I'm far too old for that."

"Okay." She shrugged. "Whatever you say."

Time crept on, and I discovered that my clothes no longer fit. This I attributed to the fact that all of the outfits I had with me were quite old, having lain in dust-covered shrink wrap in crates behind my storage panels for at least six years. Who knew what that might've done to their structural integrity?

I would just have to make myself new clothes. And this was simple enough, with the abundance of silk- and wool-producing life forms we encountered on our journeys, and sewing patterns easily programmable into Mimi's AI chip. This, too, I could ignore.

Never mind the way Mimi looked at me when I gave her the order. Never mind that she pored over my measurements for longer than she should have, and from then on watched me more closely all the time. It was nothing. What difference is an inch?

Or a foot? Plenty, it turned out, when I began dipping my head to enter my ship. When I began bending my legs to fit into the pilot's chair, and crawling instead of walking into the storage pods. But I told myself it was her, not me, probably due to that Dib monster tampering with her all that time; it sounds ridiculous, but my state of mind was such that I could believe he'd altered her proportions more easily than I could accept that something was altering mine.

So I took us to a junkyard planet and we spent several days there, Gaz and Mimi wandering through a labyrinth of downed vessels and broken machinery, me collecting scrap metal to modify my ship. I drew up blueprints, and then I melted and molded and soldered and spray-painted until I had expanded my ship such that I could navigate it without issue. _Horrible Dib creature, _I fumed to myself as I lasered my insignia onto the new outer wing. _I should have throttled him when I had the chance._

When I unveiled it, Gaz and Mimi exchanged a glance. "Nice," was Gaz's only comment as she stepped inside. "I can actually stand up in here now."

Mimi, of course, said nothing. But I could feel her looking at me for a long time, even after I turned away.

It got worse. I started to have trouble walking. So much higher off the ground than I was used to being, I'd lost my sense of balance, my center of gravity. I was tripping over things and knocking things down and misjudging the distance from my eyes to my hands to the surrounding world; my coordination plummeted, which was bad news for the pilot of a ship. Mimi adopted a permanent post beside me whenever we took off, to ensure my denial didn't cost us all our lives.

My fingers were longer and thinner and I had to relearn how to pick things up, how to hold them. My antennae were longer and I had less of a sense of where they were relative to where I was, so they ended up ensnared in everything. I woke every morning and lay down each night with a dull ache in my bones, and found my skin translucent where I had grown before it could.

All of this, I tried desperately to ignore.

I was most aware of how I'd changed when I lay with the child at night, under the dome of my environmental projector. When she was content with holding me, stroking my antennae, I noticed how my body had begun to conform to hers – how the curves of my shoulder blades, my waist, my hips, all vastly more defined than they'd ever been, flowed and fit with hers. How my legs were long enough for her to thread hers between and around them, how she could bury her face in a neck and shoulder that had stretched out to support my new frame.

When she performed her mating rituals, I noticed that she had to lay me out on my bedroll, because I was no longer small enough to nestle into her lap. That when she had first applied her tongue to the wound between my legs, I'd twined them around her neck, but now found my toes curling along the arc of her spine.

And when she came into me like a human man comes into a woman, with the project _she'd_ adopted to pass our days in the junkyard, she found great pleasure in taking me in any configuration she pleased. In having me lie on my back, our hips interlocking, my legs wrapped around her, and looking me in the eyes while she moved in me and I cried out for her, without fear that she'd crush me under her weight.

She never mentioned it, though. I believe she and Mimi both understood, more than I did, how deeply I was deluding myself, and operated within a silent pact to allow it – to let me wake up in my own time, as it were. They knew no good could come of forcing me to face what was happening, so they shared loaded glances and pretended nothing had changed.

Then one day, more or less a year out from that night in the naiala grove, that last quivering string snapped.

We had docked on the planet Nraya the night before, and Gaz and I were sleeping sprawled out across our bedrolls, tangled up in one another. I woke to find her looking at me, a half-smile hitching one corner of her lips, and she reached out to run her fingers along my cheek. Her hair brushed my skin as she delivered what I thought of as her good-morning kiss, slow and gentle and reserved for the first moments of waking. Tasting, like all her kisses, of sour candy and soda fizz.

We sat up, dressed ourselves, and she pulled a brush through her hair, before I hit the button to retract the dome. We stood, bathed in the light of the Nrayan sun—and for the first time, I was looking _down _at her. Not by much. But I was looking down at her, and she was looking up at me, and _I was taller than her_, and all at once it hit me like a spaceship hurtling to Earth.

"I…I…" I took a step back from her, blinking down at myself. _This is me, _something inside of me finally said. _This is what _I_ am. What I've become. _The realization was staggering. "Stay here."

It was all I could manage before I turned, almost fell – like always, I was tripping over myself and she reached out to steady me, which only redoubled my horror – and went back to my ship, far enough away from where we'd slept that she wouldn't see me slip in.

Which was good, because no sooner did the side panel (it had gotten to the point where I couldn't even step in through the windshield anymore) slide open than I smacked my head on the ceiling. Chest heaving with a growl that was almost a sob, I collapsed on the floor against the wall.

Mimi peeked over the backrest of my pilot's chair. Assessing the situation, she got to her feet and came over to sit with me, regarding me with expectant round eyes.

"I don't know what I'm going to do, Mimi," I said numbly, resting my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, staring at the floor. "What's—_wrong _with me?"

I had never programmed Mimi for speech because she had never seemed to need it. She looked at me and I knew what she was thinking, without her having to say a word. _There's nothing you can do. You are what you are._

"But _why_? I never asked for this." I lifted one hand to gesture to myself, and all of me that shouldn't have been there. "This wasn't supposed to happen to me."

_But it has._

"It must be a disease, a—a mutation. Some sort of aberrant gene." I bit down on my lower lip. "What if there really _is _something wrong with me? What if I just—implode in on myself, or stretch out until I snap? What if this is just a symptom, a side effect of some horrible virus growing inside of me, and it's spread too far to cure?"

In answer, Mimi stood and returned to the cockpit, motioning to indicate that I should follow. I did (albeit slightly hunched), and watched as the plates on her head retracted, a series of cables sprouting up from inside her and whisking themselves to the appropriate ports on my ship's onboard computer. Her hands moved quickly over the screen as she opened a particular log in her records, entitled _Bioscan Reports_. Its date of creation read nearly a year ago to the day; its dates of revision reflected regular updates.

My eyes widened as she scrolled slowly through the pages, allowing me to read the results of an entire year of bioscans she'd been conducting on…me. I understood, finally, why she'd always seemed to look at me for so long. All of this time, she'd been keeping tabs on me, running diagnostic checks for mutations and aberrant genes and horrible viruses eating me from the inside out.

All of this time, and she'd found _nothing_ – nothing but figures and statistics as normal as those you'd expect to find in any soldier's medical file. She showed me two reports side-by-side: one pulled from the depths of her archives, where the results of standard-procedure annual scans were stored, and one from the night before. Nothing, save my measurements, had changed.

I felt suddenly winded, overwhelmed not only by what she was showing me, but by the fact that she had it to show. "Mimi…" I shook my head as the screen flickered to black, the cables snapping back into her head. "You've been checking up on me? All this time?"

_I will admit to having been as unsettled by what's happened to you as you are. But rest assured that were it a threat to your wellbeing, I would not have let it go unaddressed._

I couldn't help but smile, if only weakly. "I suppose I should have known that much."

_I suppose you should have._

I flopped down against the wall again, Mimi hopping down out of the cockpit to perch lightly beside me. "So that's good. So I'm not going to die. But it's still…abnormal." I sighed and my shoulders slumped. "All I ever wanted was to be _normal_, you know? I mean, I wanted to excel, but I didn't want to stick out. I wanted to achieve an appropriate degree of success, and make an appropriate contribution to the Empire, and be appropriately acknowledged for my efforts. Is that really so much to ask?"

Mimi had no answer to that question. She looked at me matter-of-factly. _Just because this has happened to you doesn't mean you're under any obligation to do anything about it. You can choose to ignore it. Is that what you want to do?_

"I don't know."

_Or you can return to the Empire, and demand what's yours._

I stiffened automatically. "Mine? This ship is mine. _You_ are mine. This vile traitorous body is mine, and nothing else." Anything beyond that was far more than I could comprehend. "Understand?"

She nodded dutifully.

Groaning, I let my head fall back and hit the wall, as if I could knock loose whatever devious seed had contrived to grow inside me. "What would you do, Mimi?"

I should have known better than to ask that question of a SIR. _That is an illogical question. I will never be in your situation._

"Yeah, well, I never thought I would be, either."

Shades of sympathy passed over her face, halving her eyes and tilting them outwards. _If there is one thing I can advise you to do, regardless of what you choose, it is to come clean with the child. She's been remarkably tactful in avoiding the subject for your sake, and it's past time you two discussed this openly. _

"I know."

For a moment longer, we sat in silence, staring at the opposite wall. Then I stood up, and thwacked my head against the ceiling again, and nearly killed myself stumbling out the side panel. Mimi looked up at me and shook her head.


	14. Destinies and Opportunities

Okay, guys. Let's think about this. If the president (or the king, or the prime minister, or the head honcho of wherever you live) walked up to you right this second, yelled, "Tag, you're it!" and ran away, would you clap your hands and squeal "Yay, power!"? Or would you say "…_fuck_. What am I supposed to do now?"

I'm raising my hand for the second one. If anyone reading this thinks _they_ could handle Tak's situation with complete confidence, well…kudos, but I find that hard to believe.

Also, can we stop obsessing over the summary? The universe will upend itself in its own good time. Be patient. :p

**13. Destinies and Opportunities**

We returned to the clearing where I'd left the child to find her sitting cross-legged in the Nrayan sand, playing with a strategic planning device she'd tinkered with until it resembled a video game. When Mimi and I approached, she glanced up with one eyebrow raised, and jerked her head towards the space beside her. "About time," she said as I sat down, Mimi beside me. "What was with your spaz attack just now?"

She tucked the device into a pocket of her jeans, and I heaved a sigh. "We need to talk."

From the corner of my eye, I saw her exchange a glance with Mimi, accompanied by a nearly-imperceptible nod of Mimi's head. All over again, I realized how foolish I'd let myself be, and the depth of my own blindness washed over me. "Okay. Are we finally talking about your alien puberty?"

"It's not _alien puberty_," I snapped, feeling my cheeks grow hot.

"Then what is it?"

I stared at the sand, at the trailing tails of my dress that had slid under me when I sat. Perhaps in another's eyes, they'd have been beautiful: spun from rare Vziran silk, dyed in swirls of violet and lavender, edged in silver that glistened in the sun. But looking at them, all I wanted was the freedom to cast them off, and wear what I'd worn all my life. "I don't know."

"Well, is something _wrong_ with you?"

Mimi shook her head. "Not that anyone can see," I said.

Gaz shrugged. "So maybe it's normal."

"Normal?" The notion was almost offensive. "Child, this is as far from _normal_ as we are from Earth. This—this _does not happen._ Ever. Period." I squeezed my eyes shut, to spare myself the sight of the alien creature in whose body I now lived. "What I've become is so—so foreign, so unthinkable, for someone of my station—no one would ever—"

"Someone of your _station_?" she interrupted me, skeptical. "The hell does that mean?"

I frowned. "Must I spell everything out for you? Height and class are directly correlated in Irken society. I'm not of proper rank to be this tall."

"And what _rank _is that?"

Considering that, I gazed down at my hands, opening my palms, curling and unfurling my fingers. They were so _long_ now. More than any other feature of my new physical landscape, they seemed the opposite of phantom limbs: whereas some people lost parts of their body and still felt them for years after the fact, my hands were very much _there_, but reminiscent of marionettes' limbs. When they moved, I couldn't believe I was moving them—that they belonged to _me._

"The only Irkens I can ever recall looking like this," I finally answered, "are the Tallest."

"Your leaders?"

"Mm."

Gaz's eyes lit up. "Well shit, Sticky! Let's overthrow the fuck out of them!"

"What? No!" I recoiled. "Listen, I can't go depose my own leaders just because I'm taller than they are. That's not how it works."

"Uh, yeah it is. They're called _the Tallest_ because they're taller than everybody else, right? And if they're _not_…" She twirled her hand in small circles in the air, indicating a conclusion we both already knew. "I don't see the problem here."

"The _problem_ is, this isn't how things are _done._ No one knows how the Tallest are chosen, but—but I'm pretty sure it's not like this."

"But how can you be sure if you don't know?" She tilted her head, regarding me frankly. "Look, Sticky, I'm going to be honest with you: I think your whole system is really frickin' stupid. I've never heard of anything as dumb as putting somebody in charge because they can _literally_ look down on you, and I believe me, I _know_ dumb; I lived with Dib for sixteen years. But if you happened to hit the genetic jackpot and the rules say you should run the joint, who cares how stupid they are? You can't pass up an opportunity like this."

I stared at her. "What would you have me _do_, child? Storm in and demand absolute power?"

"Well, why not?"

She didn't understand. I was beginning to fear no one could. I was more than content to serve the Tallest; I'd never wanted to _be_ one. I'd never wanted this, any of this – never wanted any more than exactly what I should've been entitled to – but now it was being thrust upon me, with no warning and no explanation, and she said it was an _opportunity._

An opportunity to what? Be a stranger in my own skin? Ruin my peoples' power structure? Fool myself into thinking I could be responsible for an empire, when it sometimes seemed I couldn't even take care of myself? With a despairing groan, I wrapped my arms around my knees and curled up into a ball, hiding my face from the light and her eyes and the weight of a thousand worlds suddenly bearing down on me.

I heard her sigh and scoot closer to me, laying her head on my shoulder, snuggling herself into my side. Sliding an arm around me, she began running her fingernails up and down my spine below my pak, until the knot in my guts began to unwind. She still liked to play with my antennae, but she'd taken to scratching my back recently – now that there was more of it to scratch – and it felt just as good.

"You don't know why?" she said after awhile, her tone a shade gentler than it had been before.

"No," I said quietly. It would've been so much better, if I'd only known why.

She sort of kissed me on my forehead – _sort of_ meaning that she pressed her lips there and lingered, murmuring against my skin. "Look, I get it. This is weird. You're scared. But don't go thinking this is just some random shit you got stuck with, okay?" She hooked a finger around the cord of my wavebreaker and tugged, so that I blinked up at her. "I think that whyever this happened, it happened for a reason. It's your destiny, you know?"

"Irkens don't put much stock in _destiny_."

"'Irkens don't do this, Irkens don't do that.' You've done a lot of things Irkens don't do. Let this be one of them." She withdrew and climbed to her feet, casting her gaze in the direction of my ship, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the bright Nrayan sun.

"Here's what I think. I think you didn't spend the past year tripping over your own feet so you could hide in the far reaches of space forever. I think that whatever you're afraid is going to happen when we get there, we should go back to Irk, because at least there they'll tell you what's going on. You want to know why, you've got to ask, right?"

It was irrelevant, but without thinking, I corrected her, "We don't say _go back to Irk._ We say _go back to the Empire._ It would be fairly pointless to go back to the physical homeworld; we're so spread out that any Irken-controlled territory is as good as Irk itself."

"Well, _Irken territory_ doesn't give us much to go on. Where exactly in _the Empire_ would we go, for something like this?"

I looked up at her, silhouetted in the sunlight, her stance firm and her hands on her hips. She always seemed so confident, so certain that her instincts were correct and everything would turn out right; surely it was because she was a child, and blind, and unwise to the many turns life could take to derail her. But in that moment, I envied her. "We would…find the Armada, I suppose," I said hesitantly. "If we want to get straight to the bottom of it."

"Then let's find the goddamn Armada already." She extended a hand to me, crooking one finger to beckon me up. "Don't waste my time."

So I reached up and took her hand, and she pulled me up. Of course, no sooner did I get to my feet than I swayed and nearly toppled us both, wondering for the thousandth time how anyone in the universe managed to balance so much of themselves on such unsubstantial pedestals. But before I fell, she caught me by the shoulders, and held me until my equilibrium returned.

"You're going to learn, Sticky," she said, half-smiling. "One of these days."


	15. An Audience With The Tallest

RKB: Well, I'm glad somebody gets it. :) I think The Psychology of Tak actually has the potential to be pretty interesting, provided one cares enough to think about it.

Also, completely unrelated to anything in this chapter: can I just say how AMAZING it is that Olivia D'Abo is a _singer_? I mean, oh my God. Whoever's lifelong dream it was to hear Tak sing about a tragic lesbian love affair, raise your hand.

I'm actually not _that_ wild about her music, it's just—sweet cyborg Christ, I love her voice. Scratch that, I love the voice she does for Tak. I mean, all of the voice acting in Invader Zim is awesome – seriously, can you imagine what this show would be like without its cast of incredible VAs? – but I would make sweet, sweet love to Tak's voice all day and all night.

That, and her laugh. There's a lot of five-star evil laughter in Zim, and I don't mean to disregard Richard Horvitz (how he managed - and STILL MANAGES! Did anyone go to Doomcon this summer? I didn't, and so far it's my greatest regret in life - all of that without pulling a Jessica Calvello in Excel Saga is beyond me), but Tak's big evil laugh in part one of TTHNG (you know the one I mean) is a masterpiece of voice acting. FUCK. Fucking love it.

**14. An Audience With the Tallest**

"This was a bad idea."

The closer we drew, the thicker my throat grew, and the more my fingers twitched on the control panel. Gaz elbowed me in the side. "You think everything is a bad idea. Hurry up."

I hadn't been in the Armada's presence in _ages_ – sixty years at least. It seemed especially dense as we cruised through it, as we'd managed to pick a time when the Massive's entire entourage was assembled. Often, as many as half of the retainer vessels would be diverted somewhere else in the Empire, but today they surrounded it like a school of fish flanking a shark.

My ship, easily identifiable by the Irken insignia lasered onto her wings, was allowed to pass without scrutiny, but tension bound my muscles regardless. Manifest in every move I made was the respect appropriate for a fleet like ours: the keen awareness that, should it turn on me, I wouldn't stand a chance.

Gaz let out a low whistle as we approached the Massive, shaking her head. "Shit. That thing _is_ big, isn't it?" She snorted. "I still think it's dumb to actually _call_ it _the Massive_, but I guess I can appreciate the intent."

"Could you possibly be a little _more_ cavalier about this?" I snapped, my disposition made prickly with nerves. "We're in a serious situation here."

"Don't get too serious, Sticky. If you do, I might have to drag you into a closet up there, and take the _hands-on_ approach to relieving some of that tension—if you catch my drift."

I looked up from the dash to nail her with narrow eyes, hoping my utter lack of amusement came through. "Do you have anything else obscene or impertinent you'd like to get off your chest while it's just us? Because if you're going to repay me for bringing you up there by strutting around snarking at everything, making me look like a fool, I swear I—"

"Simmer down, would you?" She rolled her eyes. "I'll be good."

As we rose up under the Massive, I had my onboard computer transmit a signal to the one in the docking bay, asking for permission to come aboard. Recognizing my ship's power signature as Irken, it responded in the affirmative and a port irised open to receive us, whereupon we found ourselves landing in darkness. I shut off my ship's engine, and we filed out of the side panel into a hangar that was pitch-black – but judging by the echo of our footfalls, huge.

A ring of blinking lights set into the floor was the only illumination. When we set foot in the center of the circle, a hoverdisc detached from its groove in the floor, and floated up to deposit us in a red-paneled corridor beyond a sliding door. It was quiet there, empty. But it terminated a few feet past the door to the docking bay, so at least we had a direction in which to head.

We walked for a time, unspeaking, following the twists and turns of the corridor until we reached another hoverdisc. This one took us to a larger deck, more populous than the first. Crew members and service robots milled about, some chattering amongst themselves, some shouting orders to one another, all breezing in and out of doors and hallways branching off the central hub.

I had to admit, it left a strange taste in my mouth, seeing so many of my people after so long. Zim had been the first Irken I'd laid eyes on in years, but I loathed him such that he was an insect to me; I refused to relate to him as a member of my race. Being here would have been almost like coming home, were I seeing it from the angle I should have (then again, could I have seen it from the angle I should have, I wouldn't have been seeing it at all). Towering above even the tallest of the Massive's crew, I was painfully aware that I had no place among them anymore.

A female clad in an administrative headset skittered over to us, bent over a tablet. "What is your business here?" she demanded before looking up. "We haven't all day to…"

That was when she did look up, and _up_…and her eyes widened, and she nearly dropped her tablet, and her voice sputtered out like a transmission in a dead zone. It was horrific. _This was a bad idea. _"We want an audience with the Almighty Tallest," Gaz demanded in surprisingly passable Irken, as my voice had shriveled and died in my throat. "Now."

"Of course," the tablet drone said weakly, still staring at me. "Follow me."

So we did, through a crowd that fell progressively silent as I moved through the room. Gaz leaned over my shoulder, whispering, "That was kind of cool."

I grit my teeth, and hissed, "Shut up."

The further we went, the more of the crew we encountered, and the worse things got. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, focused like light through a magnifying lens, sent me up in invisible flames. It got to the point where I didn't bother looking at anyone, because I knew they were looking at me.

When a new pair of doors whished softly open, I didn't have to wait to feel the stares wandering their way to me, because the news was spreading like a plague and they were the ones waiting for me. I realized it was a good thing we had come here first – anywhere else, I'd have just been prolonging the inevitable.

At length, the tablet drone led us to an antechamber outside a set of vaguely imposing doors, with a grim-looking guard stationed on either side. Their eyes, shadowed though they were by the matching shelves of their brows, bugged out like all the rest.

"These people have requested an audience with the Tallest," said our guide through clenched teeth, glancing over her shoulder at us even as she spoke to the guards. What she said next, she said under her breath, but I caught it anyway. "Has someone alerted Nine?"

One of the guards left his post and opened a panel in the wall, his footsteps fading down a dark corridor. The other, sharing a nod with the tablet drone, hit the switch that parted the doors.

Once we were inside, they slid shut behind us immediately, with a _click_ that put a lump in my throat. We found ourselves in a large, circular room, washed in the same pale red as most of the Massive's interior, but better-appointed than the decks populated by the crew; one concave wall was entirely taken up by a screen, on which some inane cartoon program played. Facing it, lolling on a pair of purple lounge chairs, surrounded by plastic cups and half-empty foil bags, were the Tallest.

When they heard the doors shut, they turned to look at us. For a moment, their faces registered the same reaction I was beginning to grow numb to: slack-jawed, wide-eyed shock, albeit with more indignation than awe. Then, they exchanged a glance, and the one with the purple eyes demanded, "Hey! What are you supposed to be?"

"Well, she's probably what the intercom kept buzzing about," said the one in red. "Guess we should've picked up."

Purple glanced back at the screen as it flickered off, the program apparently having come to an end. "But it _was _a really good episode," he sighed.

"Yeah, it was." Red narrowed one eye at me. "Hey, I remember you! You're the one with the snack plan, right?"

"The snack plan!" Purple perked up. "I liked that plan!"

"Too bad Zim had to go and ruin it."

"Yeah, and too bad _you_ had to go and let him. What kind of a soldier are you, anyway? Huh? Huh? We could've really used those snacks!" Evidently so incensed at my failure that he felt the need to scold me at closer range, Purple rose from his lounger and zipped over to the threshold where we still stood, having not yet gotten a word in edgewise. Once there, he looked me up and down a couple of times, and proceeded to change the subject. "So what _happened _to you, anyway?"

Meanwhile, Red had kicked back on his lounger, slurping on the straw poking out of a plastic cup. When he heard the question, he rolled his eyes. "Don't be stupid. You know _what happened."_

"No, I—" Reconsidering, Purple cut himself off and floated back a few inches, examining our little band more closely. "I still don't get it. How?"

"Well, why do you think she's got that hairy meatsack with her?"

"You mean…" Purple's voice trailed off and he just hovered, staring at us, blinking. Then – all of a sudden – his eyes bulged and he recoiled, wailing, "That's disgusting!"

Red smirked. "_Really_ disgusting."

"Isn't it _illegal_? It should be illegal! Let's make it illegal!"

"And punishable by death."

"Punishable by super…ultra…mega death. Times three." With an exaggerated fake gag, Purple shot me a look halfway between a wince and a scowl, and shook his head as he drifted back to the lounger platform. Once there, he appeared to forget entirely about whatever was so _disgusting_ about me, turning his attention to the precarious heap of unopened foil bags swaying on a hoverdisc between the loungers. "Where are the chips?" he demanded of Red. "Did you eat all of my chips?"

I glanced over my shoulder at Gaz and Mimi. They looked helplessly back at me, the confusion swirling in my head reflected on their faces. I knew Gaz couldn't grasp the conversation to the same degree as Mimi and I, but I didn't think it mattered; it wasn't the language barrier that posed the problem here.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Gaz said anyway, switching to English for the epithet. Unfettered by rituals of reverence, she crossed her arms and frowned at the Tallest, plowing on in semi-intelligible Irken though they would've understood her no matter what she spoke. "What's happened to Tak?"

Again, the Tallest looked at each other, amused by her insistence on addressing them in our native tongue. If there was one thing the child was, it was definitely _insistent._ "Let me spell it out for you," Red answered her in English, the smirk creeping back onto his face.

"Since our time isn't up yet and Nine hasn't chosen the next in line – and since we don't get these ideas into our heads on our _own _– the only way _she_ could've ended up like she is is by coming into a…_specific_ kind of contact with a specific kind of race. A race like yours. A race that does the kinds of things _you_ do."

While we were – or at least, I was – still trying to mentally piece together his words (he called that _spelling it out?_), he reached out to pull a foil bag from the center of the pile, sending the rest tumbling to the floor and Purple fretting over the mess. As if to punctuate whatever point he meant to make, he took each side of the bag between his fingers, and popped it open.

I blinked at Gaz to see her eyes growing wide, her face evincing an understanding that still eluded me. "Oh, shit."

_What? _I wanted to hiss at her, more than fed up with being the only one still confused about my own situation_._ But my tongue, thickened by apprehension and disorientation (and the notion of respect for the Tallest, drilled too deeply into my brain for anything they said or did to dig out), refused to move.

Halfway through reassembling the tower of snacks, Purple glared at Red. "Can we not discuss this in polite company?"

"What, am I offending you?"

"Yes, _actually. _Maybe you aren't, but _I'm_ too classy to sit around talking about this stuff like we're giving somebody our drink order." Purple picked up a plastic cup teetering on the edge of the hoverdisc. Peeling off the lid, he squinted one eye at the cup's contents. "Speaking of which, what's up with this? My soda's gone flat."

"So go call a service drone and have it bring you another one."

"Well, I will."

"Good."

"Fine!" Drifting towards the door where the intercom panel blinked, Purple frowned and slowed to a stop an inch past where I stood. This time, his gaze had edged from incredulity into suspicion, his fingers drumming thoughtfully on the side of his soda cup. "Hold on a second. Are you _taller_ than us?"

Digging into the bag he'd opened, Red snorted dismissively. "Of course she's not."

"I don't know. She might be." Purple, chucking the soda cup into the radius of an incinerator halfway across the room, began to circle me. It was then that I realized – around the same time as he did – that I _was_ taller than him, if only by a few inches, and the thought was both faintly gratifying and nauseatingly terrifying.

It wasn't an easy judgment to make, given the distance between his feet and the floor and the contortion of his body in his regalia (the way Irkens of this stature were _supposed_ to look, as opposed to—_me_, gangly and untamed, like a climbing vine begging to be cut and trellised). But once we knew, we _knew. _"No, she definitely is," he announced.

He didn't sound any happier about it than I was. From his lounger, Red suggested, "Maybe she's just taller than _you_."

"We're the same height!"

"So bow down and kiss her feet then. I don't know."

"I am _not_ going to—"

Suddenly, the doors whooshed open on two new crew members in headsets, their presence snapping the threads of chatter that zigzagged across the room. For a second, nobody spoke. Red looked at Purple, and I looked at Gaz and Mimi, and to me, one of the headset drones said, "Nine will see you now."

I didn't even know who _Nine_ was. There was a vague intimation of significance in the name, as though I _should've_ known what it meant, but I couldn't think of it now; whoever it was, I hadn't asked to see them, but everyone seemed to expect me to want to and what else was I to do? My footsteps achingly conspicuous amid the sudden silence, I followed the headset drones back out into the antechamber, Gaz and Mimi as ever in tow.

"Oooh," I heard Purple crow as we left. "You're in trouble now!"

"Maybe she's not in trouble, genius," Red sniped. "Maybe Nine's going to tell her she can have your job."

"Yeah? Maybe she's going to tell her she can have _your _job!"

"Well, maybe she's going to tell her you can bite my—"

The next thing I heard was the doors clicking shut. One of the headset drones, with a clipped nod over his shoulder in my direction, headed for the panel in the wall where we'd seen the guard going before. The other, when Mimi and Gaz made as if to follow us, stopped them.

"Only the daughter of the Empire will speak with Nine," she informed Gaz haughtily, using the name humans give their offspring in absence of a more appropriate English word. The Irken term she would've used identified me not so much as a child of the Empire, but as a part of the collective it constituted. "You and the SIR unit will come with me."

Gaz narrowed her eyes. "I'm not so sure I like the sound of that."

"Just go," I said, before anyone could start making a scene. "It'll be fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Go."

The male headset drone swiped his palm over a reader set into the wall. A segment of the wall receded, and he disappeared into the darkness beyond it; without a glance over my shoulder, so did I.


	16. Nine's Story

I'd like to note that I wrote this before having listened to/read the script for _The Trial_, in which it seems to me that the characterization of the control brains (what little there is to be had) is somewhat different than in previous episodes. Thus, I wrote Nine (whose name, as a disclaimer, is total speculation; one thing that wasn't revealed in any of the produced _or_ unproduced episodes was whether or not there was a naming system for the control brains) based on my impressions of them from the produced episodes.

I incorporate the unproduced episodes into my writing on a pick-and-choose basis – that is, there are parts of them that are helpful in world-building (_Ten Minutes to Doom_'s introduction of the lifeclock, the previous Tallest in _The Trial_) and parts that take a whack at my perception of canon (the above). As they are, of course, unproduced, I figure there's no harm in that approach; we as fans are free to decide what's canon and what's not.

**15. Nine's Story**

A ways down the hall, the darkness gave way to rows of tiny red lights, lining the floor and ceiling of the narrow passage. It ended at a red door equipped with another reader. The headset drone swiped his palm again, then stood aside as the door slid open, the swivel of his gaze above his collar indicating that I should go in.

The room beyond was awash in reds and purples and silvers, slick metallic surfaces, blinking lights. The ceiling and walls were a jungle of cables and cords. In the center of the room floated a huge hoverdisc, onto which I stepped when I entered; the door whished shut behind me, and I found myself staring at an intubated orb twice my height. Its surface was plated in dark red, and studded all over with glowing yellow…eyes?

_Of course. _It suddenly dawned on me: Nine was the Massive's control brain. They all shared their names with numbers – the one responsible for overseeing the education system was Six. Blinking up at Nine, I saw myself reflected in dozens of eyes at once, and felt a bitter wind whip over me.

When last I'd stood before Six, staring into a sea of my own desperate eyes, it hadn't ended well. Maybe it was unfair, but I was instinctively distrustful of control brains, well aware of how pitiless their nature demanded they be.

All of a sudden, a resounding female voice swept through the room, coming from everywhere and nowhere. "I am Nine," said the control brain, "charter of courses, preserver of traditions, and most loyal servant of the Massive, the Armada and the Almighty Tallest." The voice paused and softened, becoming surprisingly gentle. "And your reputation precedes you.

"We believe we already know, but perhaps it would be helpful for you if you told us exactly why you have come. What is it you want, little one?"

The term went down like balled-up sandpaper, but I swallowed it anyway. I supposed Nine was one of the few who, with at least half of her eyes looking down at me, could still call me _little. _"I want to know what's happened to me."

"And is that the only thing you want?"

"Yes." Whatever Mimi thought I should demand—whatever Gaz called my _destiny_—whatever the Tallest were afraid I would do, there was only one thing_ I_ really wanted, in that moment, and that was an answer to the question that had been haunting me for a year.

"Well, we suspect that will change, with time," Nine said, "but for now, you are certainly entitled to know _what's happened to you._" She emphasized the phrase as if to remind me that the words were mine—as if I'd misspoken, somehow, and this entire situation was so foreign to me that I couldn't even talk about it correctly. "We will endeavor to explain it more…_gently_ than the Tallest did. We apologize for their dearth of diplomacy.

"The human girl you brought with you. You have feelings for her, yes?"

My shoulders stiffened. "Feelings?"

"You are fond of her. You have developed a bond with her. There's no need to deny it; we understand." Nine's voice slid through shades of silk, the acid yellow of her eyes softening to gold. I ached to believe she meant what she said. "You have been through a great deal with her. You feel she understands you. You enjoy her company. Are we correct?"

The question was purely a formality. I wasn't sure how, but a few minutes in Nine's presence and she'd already snaked her way into my head, weighing my emotions and anticipating my reactions. It wasn't a sensation I relished. "I don't—I suppose—"

Ignoring my fumbling, Nine went on, "And you enjoy being with her…physically."

I sank my teeth into my lip to keep the heat from rising to my cheeks. "What?"

"Come now, little one, don't hide from us. You don't have to be ashamed." A port near the ceiling irised open and a cable slid out slowly, draping itself across my shoulders, squeezing as one would in a hug. It was cold and my muscles tightened, but I couldn't very well shove her off. "It's not a pleasure most Irkens are familiar with," she cooed, "but it's very seductive, isn't it? Addictive, as the indulgences of lesser races often are."

I couldn't look at her. "I fail to see what that has to do with anything," I growled under my breath.

"Little one, listen and we'll tell you a story. Yes?" The prongs at the end of the cable began to stroke my shoulder, in the manner of fingers. I reflected, for a moment, on the widening chasm between how I felt when she touched me and how I felt when Gaz touched me the same way—then snuffed the thought as best I could, for fear she could hear it forming.

"The control brain network," Nine began, "is very old. We have existed in our present incarnation – my brothers and sisters and I – since the birth of the Irken Empire, and will remain in its service until its death." She spoke with none of the arrogance I'd affected telling Gaz she would always be a child to me. To her, having lived for centuries—even millennia—was a statement of fact, not a point of pride.

"In the early days of the Empire – when it was as yet a newborn creature, aimless and unconsolidated – we decided that, as one of the many gifts we would give our people in the days to come, we would assume the burden of reproduction. We would genetically engineer each progressive generation ourselves, not only ensuring healthier and more numerous young, but a society freed from the shackles of mating and its rituals. We would elevate our people above the lesser races by breaking the addiction that kept them mired in their primordial ooze.

"However, in our first trials, we observed one trait present in every individual manufactured with sealed reproductive organs. None of our test subjects reached a height of more than a few feet. We discovered that, in deactivating the hormones that produced sexual desire in our people, we also deactivated the hormones responsible for normal growth and development—and the two were inextricable.

"Which presented us with an opportunity. As you must know, little one, height is among the most meaningless of physical characteristics, but it inspires an illogical respect. Like jewels—rocks to which arbitrary values are assigned—it is something everyone wants, without knowing why they want it. Thus, we saw a clear path to installing a leader whose legitimacy would be self-evident, and require but a simple initiation: the breaking of the seal."

Nine was still petting my shoulder, the prongs of her cable raking idly up and down my sleeve, but I felt as though she'd punched me in the gut. That was how hard it hit me, when it hit me at last. _A specific kind of contact with a specific kind of race. _Why hadn't I understood?

"When you let the girl hold you in the naiala grove," Nine said softly, her voice no longer emanating from every corner of the room, but from a source that felt as if it were embedded somewhere in my head, "and she opened you, and came inside of you, and made you feel so good you sang like a little bird cupped in her hand, she was loosing the lid on a chemical that's been brewing in you since you were born.

"She broke your seal, as we have broken those of generations of Tallests before you, and you became what our people were thousands of years ago—what they now venerate as a god."

My head spun. Nine's cable on my shoulder steadied me, kept me from toppling like a tower built on a foundation of…_what?_ Naiala trees? The child's lust? My own yowling cries? Some unnamed chemical that rushed through my blood, and made me into this aberration—this fool's gold—this relic of a time only Nine and her siblings knew?

"But Mimi's bioscans—shouldn't she have—?"

As I fumbled to make sense of this revelation, Nine remained calm. "No Irken technology, save that used exclusively by the network, is equipped with the ability to detect the growth hormone. It would be counterproductive to the maintenance of the Tallests' mystique."

Nodding numbly, I looked towards the door that led to the hall. To the hall, to the antechamber, to the lounge…and…. "And they…"

Nine sighed. "We've faced our share of problems. Such as when we chose an initiate from among the elite, only to find that he had gone and—_shared_ the process with a—_companion_, and we had no choice but to appoint them jointly. But we dealt with that all right, didn't we?" She spoke as if she'd have been smiling, had she a mouth with which to smile. "And we'll deal with your problem, too."

"My—my problem?"

"Yes, little one. You're proving to be quite the troublemaker." She said it gently enough – almost warmly – but there was an edge to the words that shone like a blade. "As we believe the Tallest already pointed out, our people don't get these ideas into their heads on their own. We never counted on the possibility that a little troublemaker like you would disorder our system by fraternizing with a mating race.

"We hadn't planned on appointing a new initiate for at least another several years – and, no slight meant against your character, we likely wouldn't have appointed you. But you are here. And you are as you are. And you have been seen."

Her prongs toyed thoughtfully with the sleeve of my dress, arranging and rearranging the silk. "Yes, you have been _seen._ Near the entire crew saw you come in today, and they'll have told their friends, and their friends will have told others. We must _do_ something with you, mustn't we, little one?"

"I said all I wanted was an answer," I said, the strength finally returning to my voice. "I have it now. I don't want you to _do _anything with me."

"Mm. But what we want and what our people need too seldom align."

Suddenly, the prongs at the end of Nine's cable retracted and it snaked smoothly around behind me, establishing a connection to the central port in my pak. I realized that it had let her in automatically, without giving me a chance to refuse. "I will confer with the network," she said, "and decide what is to be done with you. In the meantime, a service drone will show you to a room, and you will sleep."

On cue, the door to the corridor opened, and another crew drone entered and took me by the wrist. "Wait!" I jerked loose from his grip. "I don't want to sleep. I want to see Gaz and Mimi. What did you do with them?"

"They will be safe, little one. You will sleep."

Whatever sedative Nine had pumped into my pak acted quickly – when the crew drone grabbed my wrist again, my arm felt too heavy to break free. Again, my head began to spin, and my knees threatened to buckle as I followed my escort down the corridor. When we reached the antechamber, he opened another panel in the wall, beyond which lay a large, dark, sparsely-furnished room: just a big black screen on one wall, a few deactivated hoverdiscs, and a pallet shoved into one corner.

That was where the crew drone deposited me. He skittered back into the antechamber, the door sliding shut behind him, and it was all I could do to lower myself without collapsing. The second I stretched out on the pallet, I slept.


	17. Fool's Gold

RKB (and can I just say, RKB, thanks for reading, as your reviews are always interesting and...well, they seem to be the only ones I'm getting lately) mentioned something earlier about thinking the Tallest weren't complete figureheads, but honestly, I do. I could write a ten-page essay explaining why, but let's just leave it at this: anyone who has time to sit and listen to Zim yell "MY TALLEST!" for _three hours_ just to see when he'll shut up obviously doesn't have pressing executive duties to attend to.

**16. Fool's Gold**

I woke cottonmouthed and disoriented, my head throbbing, my cheek stuck to the pallet. For a moment, I lay sucking the moisture back into my mouth, blinking the crust from my eyes, trying to figure out where I was and how I'd gotten there. Then, with a groan, I peeled myself off the pallet, and forced myself to sit up.

I buried my head in my hands. Ever since the naiala grove – _and it _was_ the naiala grove, how could I have been so blind? _– it seemed that every time I woke, I woke to a slightly uglier scenario, with a slightly thicker knot of apprehension pulsing in my chest.

For a year, I had been waking wondering if I could sit up without smacking my head on the dome, if I could dress without shoving my feet through the soles of my boots. Yesterday, I had stirred curled up in the cockpit and kept my eyes shut for as long as I could, knowing that the sooner I opened them, the sooner I'd have to take us out of autopilot and into the Armada.

Today, I woke knowing that I was alone, for the first time since Mimi's eyes had first flickered on near fifty years ago. Alone and clueless as to where she and the child were. Alone, and more powerless than I'd ever felt; I had never backed down from facing an enemy, but my own people?

I didn't know what Nine had determined to _do_ with me, but I knew that whatever it was – whether I liked it or not – I hadn't the thinnest sliver of a chance at escaping it, or her. Next to the Tallest, the control brains were the highest authority in the Irken Empire, and the Irken Empire was the highest authority in the universe. Besides, even if I had somewhere I could go, I'd have no way of getting there. The Massive was a fortress in itself.

I tugged the wrinkles out of my dress and straightened my wavebreaker, thinking about Nine. She wasn't cold like Six had been, but she left a sour taste on my tongue; when she touched me, when she called me _little one_, when she used _we_ instead of _I_ as if everything she said went for the entire network, I felt my skin prickle. It unsettled me that she didn't have a face I could focus on when she spoke to me, nor a pair of proper eyes.

And I _hated_ how she—_knew_ things about me, how she extracted and exploited every impulse that crackled in my brain. I felt filthy knowing that she knew about the naiala grove, hearing her recount it to me so tenderly. I didn't even like discussing Gaz's mating rituals with her after the fact; I had_ never_ wanted to know what they'd sound like in someone else's words. If there was but one memory I could've chosen to guard fiercely, what happened in the naiala grove would've been it.

I reflected on everything I could've avoided, if the child had never come into my life.

But there was little time for reflection. Whatever was going to happen, it wasn't going to happen with me sitting in here, so I resolved myself to facing my fate sooner rather than later and stood. Halfway to the door, it occurred to me to wonder whether I'd be allowed to leave – if Nine might've had me locked in, like a _little bird_ fluttering round a cage – but when I pressed my hand to the reader, the door whooshed open, and I stepped out into the antechamber.

To my surprise, I ran into the Tallest, on their way out of the antechamber towards the main corridor. Having been absorbed in conversation, they fell silent save for the slurp of soda straws, and Red looked at me and smirked. "Well, what do you know? Here's Queen Human-Splunker—" _splunk_ being a particularly nasty word for what had happened in the naiala grove, usually applied to lesser races "—now."

My face flamed, and Purple frowned. "Can we not waste time talking to her? I want to go smack that one guy on the main deck before we go."

"Which guy?" Red asked. "The guy with the scrunchy pig face? I don't like that guy either, I want to smack him, too."

"No, the guy who was always burning my doughnuts."

"I thought that was the same guy."

"What do you mean, go?" I cut in before Purple could retort, itching for an answer but still hesitant to outright interrupt them. "Go where?"

They looked at me like I was stupid, mouths slanted in matching sneers. "What, you mean nobody's told you?" Red said.

"Told me what?"

"Well, why did you think we'd call you _Queen_ Human-Splunker?" Purple demanded, as if that rude joke had been the finest example of concise information delivery I'd ever have the privilege to hear. "Too many people saw you strutting in here yesterday, looking all—like you look, so Nine decided we couldn't just throw you out the airlock. Because of you and your ugly human seal-popper, we've been fired! You better not sit in my chair!"

I could feel the color leaving my face, sucked out and swirling down a drain in my neck. "What?"

"Uh, you're taller than us, so you're the new Tallest," Red elaborated condescendingly. "Doesn't take a genius to figure it out."

"S-so Nine just—_decided_ this? Without asking me?" Startlingly enough, the first wave of shock was numbed by a stab of anger—frustration, really, at the prospect that a brain with eyes had been changing the course of my entire life while I drooled knocked out on a pallet. I had always known it was more than a possibility – at least, I'd known since I met Nine – but standing here, hearing it from Red and Purple, the demeaning reality of it hit me like a slap in the face.

"Of course she decided it. She decides everything." Red rolled his eyes. "You'll get used to it."

"She decides—what? But I thought—"

"You thought, you thought. Blah blah blah. _I_ thought we were going to be the Tallest at least until the new season of _Vort Rangers_ came out, but that didn't happen, did it?" Purple glared at me as he took a pull from his soda, sucking on the straw until the cup began to cave in. By the time it had completely imploded, his resentment seemed to have shriveled with it, and he was poking Red with his straw, saying, "I also thought we were going to be out of here by now. What's taking so long?"

"You'll still get to see it, you know. We're _retiring_, not dying." Red grabbed the straw from Purple and flicked it across the room. "And if you want to go so much, let's go, then."

"Wait!" The word escaped my throat before I could find the dignity to swallow it. As they stared at me, wearing vaguely pitying smirks, I struggled to find the words for how _wrong_ this felt. "You can't just _leave_! I don't know what I'm supposed to _do_! I don't care what Nine said, you can't just leave me here to run the whole Empire alone!"

They exchanged a glance, lips twisting into incredulous half-smiles, and again, I felt acutely patronized. It didn't help when they burst out laughing. "Don't get your antennae in a knot," Red snorted, as Purple doubled over cracking up. "You're not going to _run_ anything."

"What do you mean, I'm not going to run anything? Don't—didn't you?"

"Of course not," he said, waving away the notion like a pesky insect. "That's the great thing about being the Tallest. You don't have to _do_ anything. You just show up for the official stuff – you know, making speeches, launching initiatives, cutting ribbons with giant scissors – to get the people excited, and then you hang out on the Massive and eat snacks. Nine does all the actual work."

"Actual work!" Purple spluttered. "Can you imagine?!"

I don't think I could've processed the knowledge, in any situation but that in which I found myself then. Like a grasp of our mother tongue, reverence for the Tallest was something Irkens were born with, and we were never allowed to forget it. Throughout our lives, we were conditioned to look up to them more than literally, until we became soldiers willing to die for them.

I could've spent a century in that lounge with them, watching them gorge themselves and prattle about nothing, and still been ready to cast my life at their feet. They could've told me themselves that they did _nothing_, and I'd still have fallen to my knees in awe of them.

But they were telling me now, and for the first time in my life, it clicked. The illusion shattered. Maybe something else had been spilled in me—another chemical—that night in the naiala grove, because standing here, facing them on equal ground, knowing I was the one who would next wear their regalia, I saw them for what they were.

And it made sense. How could they ever have been anything but figureheads, when they behaved like spoiled children? How could I have believed Nine calling herself a _servant _of the Tallest, when hers was the judgment for which I'd been waiting all this time? She didn't serve them, she _babysat _them, and _she_ made the decisions they announced to their people.

_Little one, _she had called me.

"So then," I said, sort of numbly, "Nine has all the power."

"Not _all_ of it. There's lots of decisions to make that don't really matter, and you're in charge of those." Red shrugged. "But yeah, pretty much."

"Didn't you ever want to…_do_ something with your lives?"

"We didn't have to," he said airily. "Nine did it for us."

"Pretty sweet deal, right?" Purple, having recovered from his fit of laughter, suddenly remembered to be angry with me, and reworked his face into a scowl. "Why am I even asking you? Of course I'm right. All I can say is, if we're getting kicked out because _you_ just _had_ to get your freaky little freak on, it better have been good."

Red leered at him. "Well, it was good for you, wasn't it?"

"You know what would be better? A refill."

As they yammered back and forth, their voices fading to white noise, I tried to contemplate a life like theirs. I'd been terrified by the thought of having the Empire dumped into my lap, of having to make the choices that would destine us for glory or for ruin, of being the one before whom legions bowed—but did that mean I _wanted_ to be Nine's puppet?

I tried to imagine relinquishing my people to her cold cables, having all of those choices made for me, standing before roaring crowds knowing that I was a sham. Tried to envisage _hanging out on the Massive and eating snacks_, all day, every day, for the rest of my life.

_Is this what I pictured for my life? _I asked myself, with the sinking feeling that it wouldn't matter either way. _Is this what I wished for all those nights on planet Dirt, staring up at a smog-filled sky?Is this what I promised Gaz when we left Earth?_

"You know," Red brought up as I surfaced from my thoughts, "it might not be so bad going into retirement. At least if we're not the Tallest, we won't have to deal with Zim."

Purple brightened instantly. "Hey, yeah!" They were turning to leave now, the two of them having perhaps told me all there was to tell me, and me having perhaps heard all I could stand to hear. Over his shoulder, Purple flashed me a smug grin, exulting, "He's your problem now! Have fun!"

"So where should we _go_, anyway?" I heard Red muse as they drifted down the corridor, their voices echoing long after they left the antechamber.

"How about a circus planet? I love the circus!"

"No, no. Let's go to a burrito planet. They just converted one over in the Skroosh nebula, remember?"

"Well, that's just dumb. Who told them to waste an entire planet on burritos?"

"You did!"

I startled at the sudden _whirr_ of closing doors, emerging from either side of the exit from the antechamber. I hadn't even known there _were_ doors that sealed the archway, but as I watched, they slid out of the walls and clicked shut, drowning the last strains of sound from the corridor. The room was silent, and all over again, I was alone.

Until, moments later, a panel opened in the wall, and Nine's voice filled the room. "Why don't you come and see me, little one?" she purred. "We have a great deal to discuss."


	18. Something Greater

**17. Something Greater**

"Funny little characters, aren't they?" Nine chirped as I stepped into her control room, the door to the hall sliding shut behind me. I could only assume she was referring to the Talle—Red and Purple. "Sometimes a handful, but never a bore. We're going to miss them."

Her eyes were bright today, yellow as a blazing sun. I felt something inside of me twist when I looked at her. "Now, how are you, little one? Are you hungry? Would you like a snack?"

"No," I snapped. "I do not now—nor will I ever—want a _snack_ from you."

Nine paused, bemused, but still with an air affecting a smile. "Well, we hardly think that's a judgment you're qualified to make at this point," she said lightly, "but all right. Let's get down to business. We haven't a lot of time to work with, so we'll need to get you—"

"I don't want to do this, Nine." I gave the words as much weight as I could, looking straight into the two eyes nearest my level. "This isn't what I came here for."

Again, she paused, processing. Trying to decide whether to deal with me or distract me. Maybe combing my brain for weak points. "We know it's intimidating, little one," she said, her tone remaining gentle, a clawed cable snaking out of its port to pet me.

With blunt-tipped talons, she began stroking my antennae, and I seethed at the thought of her having pried into another cache of very private memories. "Don't be afraid. We'll make the transition as smooth as we can. We'll even allow you to keep the SIR unit as a pet, and the girl—" the smile in her voice became knowing, _infuriating _"—as a concubine."

"_No_." I'd have shoved her off, if I thought my strength had a chance at matching up to hers, or jerked away were there anywhere in the room she couldn't reach. Instead, I braced myself, and glared at every inch of her I could see.

"I know you heard everything we said out there, so why don't we quit playing games? I am _not_ going to be your puppet, Nine. I'm not going to waste away into a brainless figurehead, hiding under the title _Almighty_, doing nothing but watching cartoons and eating snacks. Maybe I don't know what I want out of my life—maybe I'm not sure what my _destiny_ is—but I know it's not that.

"So you're either going to take me seriously, or you're going to let Gaz and Mimi and I leave, and find yourself someone else to push around. Is that clear?"

Instantly, the atmosphere in the room changed. It was as if an icy wind had snapped through, dulling Nine's eyes, sharpening her talons. They flashed to the ends of my antennae and twined themselves into their curls, pulling them tight like thread around a spool; Nine jerked my head back so hard I gasped through grit teeth, my eyes burning wet with pain. From that angle, she seemed to loom above me, goring me with her eyes.

"_You_ will issue us no ultimatums," she thundered, her voice like a hundred voices all roaring overtop each other, all pretense of kindness dropped. "_You_ will not tell us _no._ _You _will be what we tell you you are, and your _destiny _will be shaped by _our_ hands."

As quickly as her voice had flared, it softened, into a hiss even uglier than the howl. "What is it?" she asked. "What have we done? Why don't you _trust_ us? Why do you _hate_ us?"

She let me go so that my head snapped forward and I stumbled, caught by her cable winding around me. It traveled up my body in languorous loops, pinning my legs together and my arms to my sides, its steel plates cold through my dress. "Do you resent the entire network, because we didn't give you what you wanted? Are you bitter toward us all because Six refused to forgive your failure, so many years ago?"

I stiffened, and she chuckled. "Yes, little runner, we remember you. You've been a troublemaker quite awhile, haven't you? You slipped our grasp back then—but not this time." One of her talons slid along the length of my jaw, so tenderly it was nauseating. "It's all right. We forgive you now."

Her claw wormed its way up to resume stroking me. I wrenched my head away from it, baring my teeth in a growl. "Don't touch me," I spat.

"We are the ancestral guardians of your people. If we can't touch you, who can? The Earth beast? Is that what you want?" Nine's voice hardened, becoming venomous, mocking. "You allowed her vile tongue to invade your mouth and her filthy fingers to invade your body—she planted her flag in your soil, and still hers are the hands you miss. She has broken more than your seal. Your every cell cries out for her, even now; we can hear them.

"We can teach you to feel for us what you feel for her. We can free you from her chains." I felt her coils begin to constrict. "Once the seal has been broken, the need becomes insatiable. How do you suppose we repaid your predecessors for their service to the Empire, when there was only one who bore the burden? We know of the hunger you feel, little runner, and we know how to feed it."

Into her voice crept the sound of a smirk, bringing the taste of bile to my mouth. "_Never_."

"We shall see." Before she could sicken me further, she wandered on to push her fingers into another pressure point, her talons wrapping themselves around the cord of my wavebreaker. "Now, what is _this_?" she mused, in a tone that said she knew exactly what it was. "How do you suppose you stumbled across this technology? You must have been a precocious little soldier. We've never had the pleasure of meeting someone versed in the use of wavebreakers.

"But just how well versed are you, little runner?" She pressed the key that released the wavebreaker, peeling it off to leave a set of pinpricks in my skin. "Do you understand the full potential of wavebreaker technology? Have you seen it crack open a mind as easily as a melon, and drink the nectar of its secrets? Have you seen it change the course of a life? Of an entire race? Or are your brain waves too weak to do anything but…play with Earth children like toy soldiers?

"Let us pose another question. Have you ever experienced its effects?"

Without warning, my eyes gravitated to hers as though drawn there by a magnet, and found them…luminous. A rich, pulsating gold, comparable to nothing I'd ever seen. Arcs of electricity began to dance between them, charging the air around us, filling my chest with a rising, swelling balloon of warmth—nearly cracking my bones, straining the limits of my skin—blocking off my throat—and then surging, splashing, into my skull.

I felt the light pooling behind my eyes. Flooding the dry riverbeds in my brain. Her eyes glowed and it enveloped me, and soon I could think of nothing else. What had she been saying, only a moment ago? What were we doing here? It drowned in the light filtering through my eye sockets, the golden fingers plunging into me.

Perhaps I still knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, what she was doing. Perhaps I felt my footing slip. But Nine was nothing but brain waves, swirling inside her shell, and this time I was the weaker life form; inevitably, I fell.

"Poor little runner," she sighed, suddenly so gentle, so sweet. "You must be so _tired._ So many years fighting, struggling, clawing your way up only to be pushed back down again. So much hope and perseverance, crushed beneath ill fortune's heel. Life has been so cruel to you, for so dreadfully long."

I felt Nine's talons trace the spiral of my right antenna, but this time, I didn't resist. Why would I? It didn't matter. I barely even felt it. My senses were suffocated by the energy flowing from her, numbing my skin, thickening my tongue.

"Don't you want to rest? Wouldn't it be nice not to need to fight anymore—to have everything you've always wanted served to you on a platter, by all of the people who tried to hold you down? Isn't it time you laid down that weight you've been carrying, and let the good things come to you?" Her voice lowered to a murmur. "Isn't it time to stop running?"

From where I floated, adrift on a groundless glowing plane, everything she said sounded like a good idea. But I could only blink in reply, too dazed to bob my head in a nod.

"You need us, don't you?" she whispered. "You can't do this alone. How could you lead your people into anything but ruin, when you couldn't even drag yourself from the dirt? You lost to the laughingstock of the Irken Empire, you failed to avenge yourself on a human child—your corpse would be rotting on Earth as we speak, if she hadn't taken mercy on you. You would crack beneath the weight of the Empire's expectations, without us to hold you up. Now, you tell us—is that _clear_?"

Clear? What was clear? Nothing but the light in her eyes, speaking to me like no voice ever could. "Yes," I heard a voice that couldn't have been mine mumble, from what felt like far away.

The cable's coils slowly receded, leaving me swaying on the hoverdisc. "Good girl."

Briefly, a memory surfaced, flickering at the edges of my mind. Gaz's favorite nickname for me was Sticky Tak – and how long had it been, since I'd last heard her call me that? Days? Weeks? Years? – but I remembered having been told I was a _good girl_, on certain nights when I lay wrapped, sweat-slick, in her arms.

When she was touching me in that way she had, making me tremble, and I was so near crisis it almost hurt and gasping that I couldn't, I _couldn't_—it was one of the little encouragements she murmured, a grin curling her lips against my skin, and how I _hated_ it! How I hated that she _knew_ I hated it, and favored it all the more!

She said, once, when I snarled at her, _so what if you hate it? I love it. I love how you turn turquoise when I say it, and the heat spreads from your face all down your body. I love how you get so warm against me, and all I want to do is hold you, and burrow into you, and never let you go._

It hadn't helped. I hated it still. But in that moment, before the memory died – before it was sucked, with the rest of me, into Nine's vortex – I'd have given anything to hear her say it.

"Now, little one," Nine's voice echoed in my head, "there is something we must do." Two long, slender arms with silver prongs extended from either side of her, one bearing a thick spool of lavender ribbon. "You need to be modified."

The strangeness of the word penetrated my trance, if only for an instant. "What?"

"We must begin training your body to achieve the physical standards expected of the Tallest. It's about more than height, you know. You have to fit into the regalia." She chuckled indulgently. "Or had you assumed that would happen on its own?"

I supposed I had. But it made sense – everything Nine said was making sense now – and I didn't question it. I just stood there staring at her, awaiting her next order.

"Remove your clothing. You won't need it anymore."

It had taken me months to allow the child to undress me, even knowing that she knew me far more intimately than bare skin. Even when I did, she was always the one who had to do it, because I drew the line at stripping for her; I could squeeze my eyes shut while she unzipped my dress, but I refused to suffer the indignity of deconstructing myself. Not just of casting off my own armor, but of performing, _displaying_ like an animal. _Never, _I told her, and I had meant it.

But when Nine told me to remove my clothing, I did. There on the hoverdisc, I pulled off my boots and lowered my leggings, peeled my gloves from my arms. She undid my dress and I slipped out of it, and I was standing before her naked as the day I emerged from my gestation tube.

I should have been keenly aware of how strange I looked, how wholly graceless, how like the praying mantis I'd once watched crawling down Gaz's windowsill. The more I'd grown, over this past year, the less of me I'd wanted her to have to see; I had snapped at her when her gaze lingered too long.

With Nine, I didn't care. I wasn't looking down at myself. I was looking into her eyes.

The ribbon was two, maybe three inches wide, and spun of silk with an unusual grip and strength. This I understood when Nine took my left hand in her prongs, folded my thumb into my palm, and wrapped a layer of ribbon around it. She bound my hand from my wrist to my first knuckles, each layer pulled a little tighter than the last, until she'd pressed my thumb into my palm so hard it throbbed as if to snap.

She heard the half-cognizant croak of pain before it welled in my throat. "Isn't this what you want, little one?" she purred. "To look as you should? Didn't you think yourself unruly as a wild vine, crying out for the gardener's shears?" She opened her prongs for my other hand, and I extended it. "This is your trellis, little vine," she said soothingly, cutting a new length of ribbon from the spool. "You will be tamed, and you will flower."

When she had wrapped both my hands – leaving them less hands than prongs like hers, two long fingers jutting awkwardly from the bindings – she had me tilt my head back, and laced my neck up in quick, jerking tugs. She didn't pull the loops as tight as she could have, that a narrow sliver of my throat might still push and pull breath, but tight enough to stretch my neck, from chin to collarbone, into a straining stalk. My head swam, drooping, heavy; my neck pulsed under its weight.

Something struggled to the surface of my mind. "I don't understand," I found myself having to force out, almost spitting.

"You needn't."

"But…" Reflexively, my fingers rose to clutch at the bindings compressing my neck, perhaps mistaking them for someone's hands. Nine's prongs caught and lowered them. "There must be a better way," I mumbled. These methods were primitive methods, _human_ methods. Only lesser races – races without our technology, without our intelligence – sacrificed to attain their ends.

When Nine spoke next, her voice carried a note of warning. "We introduced ourselves to you as _preservers of traditions_, did we not? Thousands of years ago – before you, even before us, when our race still dwelt among the beasts and the brush on the planet called Irk – this was how our people made themselves beautiful. We do this to honor them."

She took me by the shoulder and turned me around, her prongs digging into my skin harder than they had to. "They suffered for their people, and so shall you."

Chastened, I stayed silent as she bound my midsection, beginning beneath my breastbone and looping, in more quick, jerking tugs, down to my hips. Up, down, back up again, until my ribs felt as though they might crack. Until I was sure she'd crushed my organs to a pulp, shoved my bones out of their sockets, and still she was wrapping, tightening. When I blinked down and saw my waist no thicker than a laser beam, a wave of nausea weakened my knees, and my upper half swung on its thinning hinge.

Nine's prongs slid around my chest before I could collapse, pulling me back up, holding me steady on the hoverdisc. By then, I was bleary-eyed, lightheaded, laboring to draw breath. She sighed. "Soon, little one," she said softly, "you will have a palace covered in flowering vines, and filled with the wonders of a thousand worlds."

Then, she presented me with my own set of regalia, indigo lined in silver. First, there was a high-collared underdress, then a long skirt; then she encased everything above the waist-bindings in a spherical chestplate, much heavier than I'd expected.

It was so heavy, in fact, that it began to pull me down, drawing my spine into a wilting arc, and nearly toppled me before Nine caught me again. Over my hands and forearms, she locked a pair of armlets, their curved surfaces shining, reflecting the light in her eyes.

The last things she gave me were five indigo rings, beginning as hoops she slipped over my head and chestplate and shrinking to fit my waist. When she'd slid all five into place, striping my midsection in bars of three-dimensional color, she ran the tip of a prong along the edge of the uppermost ring, and I suddenly found myself floating a few inches above the hoverdisc.

"The hoverrings will allow you to get around more easily," Nine said, "and help you to keep your balance. They work fairly intuitively, so you'll get used to them soon."

For a minute, she withdrew her arms and looked at me, radiating pride – in me or in herself, I wasn't sure. _She's happy_, something inside me – or outside me, nearer to the place where the narcotic light lived in her eyes – whispered. _You should be happy, too. _

Staring at my reflection, I saw neither happiness nor sadness, nor anger, nor anything strong enough to bounce back from the mirrors of her eyes. I didn't even recognize myself. In Six's eyes, my face had sagged, darkened, but still it had been _mine_; the face I saw now was a mask, eyes hollowed out, lips painted shut. It could have belonged to anyone.

No, I knew this face. This was the face of the Almighty Tallest. The face of the figurehead carved onto the bow of the Irken Empire; the face of Nine's little vine, her _good girl. _This face was the last part of me left unbandaged, unarmored, but it was the part I realized knew least.

Exhaustion settled over me like a cloak, thick and heavy. I was tired, and my head was spinning, and I was in a spectacular amount of pain; thus, the revelation didn't resonate in my head, so much as it fizzled and died. What did it matter, who I was or wasn't? I was in no place to process it. Nine would do that for me.

"All done. That wasn't so bad, now, was it?" As I had the day before, I felt Nine's cable connect to my pak, but this time I didn't expend the effort of glancing toward it. Whatever she was doing, it was for the best. "We'll administer a little anesthetic, and you'll feel better in no time. Then – if you still care to – you may see your friends."

_Friends. _Gaz and Mimi. What would they think, seeing me this way? _They'll love you all the more, _whispered that voice that came from the glittering no-man's-land between where I ended and Nine began. _They'll think you're beautiful. They'll understand that you are something greater now, and you will be a wonder in their eyes. _

_And if they don't, what should you care? You are something greater now. You will live in a palace covered in flowering vines, and its walls will surround you, and shut them out. _


	19. Eyes Hollowed Out

In my personal fanon, the control brains are at least partially organic. I got the impression from the series (or was it from the DVD commentary?) that they were Irkens engineered to take the form of brains without bodies, housed in shells that allow them to interact with the world. You can refer to my author's note for _Nine's Story_ for my thoughts on how _The Trial_ complicates things. Nine will talk a little bit about the nature of the control brains as I see them in the next chapter, but again, that's just my personal fanon.

On another note, apologies if Rel's outbursts are broken in weird spots. For some reason, the document manager tends to do that to big blocks of text without spaces.

**18. Eyes Hollowed Out**

_Gaz speaking_

Tak was really smart, most of the time. But she could also be really stupid.

The better I got to know her, the better I understood how stubborn she was, and how the strength of her will sometimes _made_ her do dumb things. Dumb things like refuse, all at all costs, to acknowledge that she was growing like a frickin' weed, because it was too incongruous with her perception of the world.

Dumb things like stand there while the smarmy douchenozzles she called her leaders flat-out _explained_ to us what had happened (what I'd done), then blink around like they'd been speaking Chinese, because she was so determined to shove my _mating rituals _into the darkest corner she could find in her head. Dumb things like go off into that door in the wall, alone, to meet someone whose name she didn't even know, because she was too proud to admit she might need us.

First of all, I didn't get all the angst over her alien puberty. She, through her conspicuous silence, and Mimi, through a series of meaningful glances, had communicated to me that it was a Big Fucking Deal, but I didn't see why; if we could've just talked about it from the get-go, it wouldn't have been so weird. And in any case, it was weirder for them than for me. I kind of liked it.

Correction – I _really_ liked it. More and more all the time. I liked that I could grab her and kiss her without having to lean down. I liked that I could spoon up to her and tangle our legs together, feel her warmth all down my body instead of just against my chest.

I liked catching her by the shoulder, pinning her to a wall (when walls presented themselves), and grinding my hips into hers until her protests melted into purrs, until she was all but begging me to slide my hands down her thighs and under her skirt. I liked that by the time she could look me in the eyes without lifting her chin, her fingers were near twice as long as mine, so that (when I finally convinced her to) she could give as beautifully as she got.

I liked watching her walk (when she wasn't tripping over her own feet) – how she didn't skitter, but strode, and her legs shifted under her dress. I liked the lines of her body sprawled out on our bedroll at night. I liked that I wasn't dating (dating, fucking, mooching, cohabitating) a stumpy little firecracker of a bug monster anymore; I had me a legit Katy Perry E.T. now, a centerfold in _Playmates From Beyond the Stars._ So far as I could see, life was good.

But then shit got serious, and we ended up on the Massive. The second we showed up in that lounge, I knew things were going south. For all Tak seemed to respect them, the Almighty Tallest were about as almighty as my asscrack; I felt sure there was no way those goons were actually in charge of anything, and my instincts told me the system jerking their strings was pretty pervasive. If Tak got tied up in it, there was a good chance it wouldn't let her go.

So I _tried_ to go with her to see this Nine person, to keep her from getting herself into anything she couldn't get out of, and she shut me down. Just like that. She disappeared into the wall, and left Mimi and I with nothing to do but follow some imperious green nub down a bunch of hallways to "our room."

It was a windowless round space, paneled in pale purple, furnished with a wall-mounted screen and a couple of those floating saucer things. In one corner hovered something like a hollowed-out half-moon, lined with cushions, and I guessed it was supposed to be a bed.

"You will stay here until your presence is requested," our chaperone said curtly. "A service drone will be in to feed you soon."

She left and the doors clicked shut, leaving us alone. Just to be sure, I went over to the little screen set into the wall beside them, and pressed my palm to it; a tiny light blinked red and a discouraging tone sounded, a sort of _nr-er_ like the click of a chiding tongue. The doors didn't open.

"Well then." I glanced down at Mimi, who stood blinking warily around the room. I couldn't understand her the way Tak could – the way they communicated, it seemed almost as if she had a voice I couldn't hear, a frequency to which only Tak was tuned – but I was getting better and better at intuiting her emotions, or what passed for emotions in a SIR. "I guess we'd better settle in."

As Mimi assessed our new surroundings, I drifted over to flop down in the moon-bed, curling up and considering the nature of the hole I'd sent us all stumbling into. Because this _was_ all my fault, wasn't it?

Not just because I'd prodded Tak into coming here. Because I did what I did to her in the anglerfish forest (even though she fought me, even though she said _I don't want to do this_), and I made her this thing she didn't want to be. I didn't know how and I didn't know why – and I certainly hadn't known at the time – but I knew, even if she didn't, that my fingers had been the instruments of her transformation.

My pale, unassuming fingers, their knuckles just slightly on the bony side, their nails dark with chipping polish I'd made from ground clay and oil. Lying there in the moon-bed, I cupped the lower half of my face, brushing my fingertips below my nose; I could almost still smell her on them, from the nebulous space-night before we reached the Armada. From when, watching her shoulders tense under her dress, I'd decided she needed to be de-stressed.

_You've got to relax, _I'd told her, sliding myself into her lap, straddling her in the cockpit. _Mimi, would you mind powering down for a little while? I'm going to try to unsticky Tak._

I smiled behind my hand at the memory. Felt a spate of renewed faith in our ability to thoroughly kick the ass of whatever came our way. _Fuck their system. I'm not going to let that be our last good time. _

All of a sudden, I was jerked from my thoughts by the sound of a panel sliding open – a little section of the wall, not more than three feet high, receding with a soft _vrrt. _Out of it scurried a smocked Irken with curly antennae and red eyes, smaller than Tak had ever been. Based on the tray she carried, I assumed she was the "service drone" who was supposed to be bringing me dinner, but she didn't announce herself right away. For at least a minute, she just stood there staring up at me, her eyes huge, her jaw slack.

Finally, I rolled my eyes. "Take a picture, why don't you? It'll last longer."

That seemed to snap her out of her stupor. "Oh! I'm sorry." She skittered over to one of the floating saucers, set the tray down on top of it, and pushed it through the air across the room, right up to the edge of the moon-bed where I sat. "I've brought you—umm—your meal."

Glancing down at the tray, I saw a glob of something warm and vaguely meaty, and a hard, cold slab that bore a faint resemblance to bread. The scent of burning hair wafted through the air. I wrinkled my nose. "You call this a _meal_?"

"Welltheytoldmetoprepareanutr ientpastesuitableforhumandig estion," she burst out, all the words running together as if she couldn't get them out fast enough, "butIwasexperimentingwiththem attergeneratorandIcameupwith whatIthoughtyourbioreadoutsi ndicatedwouldbeappropriatesu stenanceforamemberofyourspec iesbutifIwasmistakenIcan—"

"It's _fine_," I cut her off, raising my voice to make it heard above her babbling. "Calm down. It's fine."

It wasn't, of course. Sitting there poking the food with a spork, watching the meat bubble and the bread fossilize, I knew there was absolutely no possibility that any of it would be getting anywhere near my mouth anytime soon. So instead of eating, I looked up through my bangs and watched my waitress watching me.

I'd always nursed the notion that all Irkens looked the same – what was there to differ between them, save the color of their eyes? – but this one was of an entirely different flavor than Tak. Her skin was a very pale shade of green, and her eyes were so light they were almost pink. Pink and round and sort of liquid, watery, as if their boundaries might change shape at any moment.

Twin fringes of fine, fluttery eyelashes surrounded them, miles from the bladelike contours of Tak's. Her antennae, too, were somehow less decisive. Whereas Tak's reminded me of the insides of nautilus shells, her spirals were wispy and insubstantial, like the quickly-fading swirl of cream in coffee.

And she was _gawking_ at me. When she realized I was looking at her, she colored and glanced away, but as soon as she felt safe her gaze snuck back to me. She was looking at me like the rest of the crew had looked at Tak on the way in – like I was some kind of fascinating rarity. I determined to figure out what exactly captivated her so much about me, when none of the other crew members had spared me a second glance.

"Hey." I flicked the spork at her, bouncing it off of her head. "You. What's your name?"

"My name?" She blinked at me as if it were a strange question—as if she had to consider the answer. "Uh—it's Rel."

"Okay, Rel. Why are you staring at me?"

She went a deeper shade of turquoise than I'd ever seen on Tak's face, backing up, glancing over her shoulder at the wall from which she'd emerged. "I-I don't—I'm sorry. I should go."

"Wait." The second I said it, she froze, as though the word itself had arrested her. "Come back. I really want to know."

For a second, she was silent, staring at her feet. Then, her cheeks burning brightly, she said, "Well, you—you're an _alien._ I've never met an alien before."

I snorted out a spurt of laughter – half at the first part, half at the second. "Come off it. You _live _on this hulking hunk of space junk, and you've never laid eyes on _anyone _who's not Irken?"

"Never," she said with a few quick, bobbing nods, wide-eyed, sincere.

"How is that even possible?"

"I'm just a service drone. I don't usually greet visitors, or spend much time on the main decks. A-and ever since I started working here, I haven't left the ship." She nodded over her shoulder at the wall behind her. "We have a system of transport tubes all throughout it, so we can get around faster and not make nuisances of ourselves. I don't see anybody except the crew members I'm assigned to, and the other service drones."

"Well, that sucks. If I were you, I'd get another job."

She giggled like I'd cracked a joke. "I can't get another job," she said plainly, even blithely. "I'm encoded as a service drone. I have to be what they say I should be, just like everybody else."

I raised an eyebrow. "Who's _they_?"

Rel shrugged. "Does it matter?"

Having no answer for that, I let the conversation die. She stood there twiddling her thumbs, looking at the floor, unspoken to and thus unspeaking; I swung my legs over the edge of the moon-bed, thinking. Mimi, having made her rounds of the room, gave Rel a once-over and hopped up to sit beside me – maybe having decided that, in Tak's absence, I was the one to whom she ought to report. I found the thought strangely comforting.

"Rel," I said after awhile, "who's Nine?"

"She's the control brain for the Massive."

Tak had mentioned the control brain network before, in the course of this conversation or that, but we'd never discussed it in much detail. I'd never thought we'd need to. "And what exactly does a control brain _do_?"

"They serve the Tallest," Rel answered promptly, with all the conviction of someone who believed wholeheartedly that what she was saying was true. "They take care of all the things the Tallest can't attend to personally, since the Empire is so big, and then they report back. Sort of like—the next link down on the chain of command."

Of course. I'd known there had to be somebody behind the scenes, doing what people like Rel and Tak were so sure the Tallest did, but I hadn't known who. Now the pieces began to fall into place.

If there was really an entire network of control brains (whatever a control brain actually _was_), scattered throughout the Irken Empire, it'd be more than easy for them to call the shots, while the Tallest smiled and waved and gave the people somebody to worship. Not a bad system, I guess. If the Empire was as big and as powerful and as prosperous as Tak had always built it up to be, it certainly seemed to work.

But was that what I wanted for Tak? A life as a paper idol? Did I want her to become what I'd seen in the lounge? What I loved about her was how smart she was (most of the time), how resilient, how determined. I liked her best when her fingers were flying across her ship's dash display, when she was blasting snarling space monsters with her pak-mounted lasers, when she was laughing her crazy shrieking victory-laugh.

If Nine sucked the spirit out of her and replaced it with popcorn and doughnuts, what would I have left Earth for? To waste my life in the harem of a puppet queen, watching her eyes grow duller every day?

After I sent the food away with Rel, resigning myself to missing dinner that night, the lights in the room were dimmed, and there wasn't much left to do but sleep. The weight of my thoughts didn't make it easy, but eventually, ensconced in the moon-bed, I drifted off.

The next morning – what I could only assume was the next morning – Rel brought me some inedible breakfast, and soon after she left, the doors to the hallway slid open. "You may see the Tallest now," said a headset-clad member of the crew, nodding sharply to Mimi and I. "Follow me."

A cold knot, like a clenched fist, formed in my stomach. Still, I got to my feet, Mimi alongside me, and together we did as he said.

I didn't know – and I didn't dare ask – what he'd meant when he'd said _the Tallest_. I wasn't sure if we were going to see those yammering assclowns from the lounge, for some reason, or if—no. I told myself he couldn't mean Tak. There was no way it'd have happened so fast, so _soon_, and without me—she wouldn't let it. _If she had a choice, _I reminded myself darkly, staring at the back of our escort's head.

We stopped at the end of a long, wide hallway, red like near-everything else on the Massive, with a pair of tall doors standing solemnly before us. The headset guy swiped his palm over the reader. "Wait here," he said, and slipped through the doors.

A minute later, they opened again, and he returned – this time, shepherding Tak along with him. Or at least, someone—some_thing_—resembling her.

The cold fist in my stomach rose into my heart. She was—_twisted_, like the yarn in a God's eye. She looked as if they'd ground her up, liquefied her, and poured her into a new mold – into the body of a gnarled, misshapen creature, swollen and spherical in some places, ribbon-thin in others. A chimera with the pincers of a crab, the hump of a camel, the neck of a crane.

I didn't know how she could stand, bent over as if bearing an enormous weight, her waist no thicker than my index finger—and then I realized she _wasn't _standing, but floating, her shadow a disc on the floor beneath her. Like I'd seen the Tallest (the Tallest before her) doing when we met.

The effect was grotesque, and I ached all over for her. I didn't give a shit what those morons in the lounge looked like, but seeing her broken in their image made me sick. Not only that, but the look on her face, too numb and blank and dry to have retained even a shadow of my Sticky Tak—like a mask, eyes hollowed out, lips painted shut.

"God." The word slid out slow and hoarse, muddied by the way my throat closed when I looked at her. Like looking into an empty pitcher. "What did they _do _to you?"

She blinked, paused. "Nothing," she said blankly after a moment, not even really meeting my eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"The hell are _you_ talking about? You look like somebody chewed you up and spit you out."

Had I said that to her at any other moment, she'd have hauled off and slapped me. This time, there wasn't so much as a ripple in the surface of her eyes. "Modifications," she answered. "It doesn't happen on its own, you know."

"What's wrong with you? You've got to snap out of this, Sticky." I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. "Come on, take that shit off and let's go. This isn't really our scene, right?"

She shook her head slowly and began to drift down the hall beside our-escort-turned-hers. "This is the only place I need to be."

The knot in my heart – _fear_, I knew now, it was fear – thickened as I followed her, Mimi's anxious footsteps _clink_ing along behind me. "Didn't it—doesn't it _hurt_?"

Again, she shook her head. "I can't feel it," she said in a wispy, wandering monotone. "I don't feel anything anymore."

The headset guy said something to her in Irken, too quietly and too quickly for me to pick up much of anything. Her answer, I could understand: to whatever he'd told her, she said _yes_, in the same resigned mumble with which she spoke English. "Listen, I don't know what's wrong with you," I said, as forcefully as I could, almost snapping, "but this has to stop. This isn't what you _want_, is it? To be somebody's _dog_? To roll over whenever this Nine bitch tells you, and be paraded around on her leash?"

"You know nothing of what I want," she said, sounding just a little bit sad.

We reached a fork in the hallway, and our chaperone moved from her side to mine. She hovered for a moment opposite us, framed by the receding corridor, regarding me with those shallow-water eyes.

"Tak," I said as the headset guy took me by the wrist, not letting him drag me away from her just yet. I couldn't think of what else to say. All that came out was her name, without even a "sticky" appended to it, searching for its owner in her shell.

For half of half a second, a glimmer of lucidity shone in her gaze, but it wasn't the epiphany I had hoped for. When she spoke, a stripe of the fog in her voice had cleared—but she didn't say what I had hoped to hear.

"You did this to me," she said softly, all too clearly. Then, she turned her back, and drifted away.


	20. Lips Painted Shut

So long as this chapter has…uhh, really nothing to do with shipping whatsoever, I'm going to go ahead and talk about it a little for my own enjoyment. Obviously, I ship TAGR, but I also ship RAPR like a motherfucker (THEY'RE TOTALLY DOING IT, DON'T EVEN TRY TO DENY IT) and…*flinches in anticipation of earning the disgust of whoever's still reading at this point* ZADR. A little bit. Under very specific circumstances.

I mean, don't get me wrong. The crappy fanfics whose summaries consist of "ZIM AND DIB GET PAIRED UP FOR HEALTH CLASS SO THEY DECIDE TO MAKE TEH HUMAN SEXSES AND FALL IN TWU WUV", the fangirls embarrassing themselves by begging Richard Horvitz to say "I love you, Dib" at InvaderCon (I mean, oh my God, I was embarrassed on behalf of the entire fandom), the Youtube slideshows of fanart consisting of the two of them looking like anime-style high-schoolers with a few features switched out, picking petals off of flowers or snuggling wrapped up in a scarf or some shit, set to a Taylor Swift song…no. Just _no. _I don't go in for that.

But I _do_ think it has some appeal as a concept, so long as it's executed carefully and with taste. If the mostly antagonistic nature of their relationship is preserved, and the rules of the universe are kept in mind (ZIM WILL NOT JUST MAGICALLY BE DIB'S HEIGHT IN HIGH SCHOOL, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG), I think it's believable that an obsession as powerful as the one they share could become sexual. _Become_, not _is in the series._ Dib is _eleven_, for fuck's sake.

Or is he ten? *glances around awkwardly* Okay, that's enough of that.

**19. Lips Painted Shut**

_Tak speaking_

The days leading up to my Presentation passed in a blur, squished together like a still-wet painting smeared by someone's thumb. I stared into Nine's eyes while she spoke to me, stroking my antennae with her prongs. She dosed my pak to numb my pain and help me sleep. Every so often, someone handed me a foil bag or a plastic cup, and I swallowed whatever was inside.

Nine set our course for Irk.

It would be simple, she said. We would leave the Massive at a docking station and take a retainer vessel down to the surface of the homeworld, and there I would stand on a pedestal and deliver to all of my people (all those who mattered, anyway) a speech that she had composed. I would be officially Presented as the Tallest, and the roar of the crowd would fill the empty cage of my ribs, and then I would have a snack and a nap. Simple.

In the meantime, Nine busied herself making preparations. Ordering statues built in my likeness (the likeness of the mask I saw in her eyes), and banners emblazoned with my face (the face of the mask I saw in her eyes), and the old statues demolished and the old banners burnt. Spreading the word of my Presentation, convening Irkens of sufficient rank from the farthest reaches of the universe. Briefing those who would deal with me personally – advisors, invaders, members of the crew – so that they would know how to please me before we ever met. I conceded that she knew this better than I.

I saw Gaz and Mimi once, and not again.

I took to lolling in a lounger on the bridge, staring out into space and at Irk as we approached. It was a pretty planet, really. From a distance, a swirl of red-pink (red buildings, pink streets), almost marbled—like a glittering round jewel nestled in a black, star-freckled throat.

I couldn't remember when I'd been there last. Then again, I couldn't remember a lot of things lately. What had happened to my wavebreaker. Where we'd last been before the Massive. The nickname Gaz used to call me, before she was somewhere-not-here.

It didn't matter, though. Nine said it didn't matter, so it didn't matter, and I didn't worry.

At least not most of the time. There were nights when I would wake up in the room where Nine had installed me (not the room with the pallet – a big, lavishly-furnished room, with lavender panels and a great arcing ceiling and a bed that seemed to swallow me when I lay down) filmed in cold sweat, clutching at my temples, feeling that my skull would shatter from the thunder of the voice screaming inside it.

A yowling, raging, unceasing scream, like a beast clawing at the bars of its cage. _HOWCOULDYOULETTHISHAPPENTOYO UYOUWORTHLESSSNIVELINGINSECT HOWDAREYOULETNINEMAKEYOUHERD OGFEEDYOUHERLIESSUCKOUTYOURM INDLOOKATYOURSELFLOOKATWHATY OU'VEBECOMESOMETHINGCHEWEDUPAND SPITOUTYOUHAVETO_FIGHTBACK_!_

But Nine would always come to me, while I lay curled up with my head buried in hands too insubstantial to hide me from the voice, and persuade my pak to send me back to sleep. And the next morning, someone would escort me to her control room, and the glow of her eyes would burn a million tiny holes in me, and shine through them and through me, scattering pinpoints of light like naiala leaves, and the voice – I began to call it _the fightback voice_, after the phrase it howled the loudest – would fall silent for a time.

One day, I lay in my lounger looking out at Irk, when it seemed exactly the size of a glittering round jewel in the crown of the Empire (my crown). I was sucking absently on the straw of a slushie, and Nine was hovering over my shoulder—well, not quite Nine, but the part of herself she could project from her control room. Her voice and the instruments she used as her limbs, folded into every ceiling and wall.

"You're not alone, you know," she said quietly, reflectively. A departure from her typical soothing brightness, in the bitterness that lurked beneath the words.

"Yours is not the only sacrifice made for the good of the Empire. You're not the only one who's lost your freedom—given up your dreams." These weren't the kinds of things one was meant to say in places like the bridge, where the crew in their headsets and high collars ringed the platform where I sat—but perhaps those headsets filtered out the things they weren't supposed to hear.

Or perhaps they were just too inconsequential for Nine to care. Perhaps we, as god-kings and golden idols, towered so high above them that they simply…disappeared. "What do you suppose we are, little vine?" she said. "Nothing but masses of wet, pulsating tissue, housed in blinking shells. Nothing but invalid creatures, dependent upon an arsenal of technology to keep our neurons firing. Nothing that knows freedom. Nothing that can dream.

"We will never know the beauty of a drawn breath. We will never know what it is to smell, to taste, to touch. The pleasures that the girl taught you, that echo in the corners of your mind even now—the flesh-memories that make your pulse quicken when your skirt brushes your thigh—are as impossible for us to imagine as it is for the blind to imagine light.

"We will live for millennia after your bones have crumbled to dust," she murmured, "never leaving our cable-cluttered rooms. We will watch a hundred worlds bloom and die, and never set foot on their soil. We will trellis a hundred more climbing vines, never knowing the oceans they've crossed, the heights to which they've soared.

"You sit there aching in your bindings and thinking what monsters we are for having done this to you, lamenting the loss of a future that's yours. But you, at least, have the memory of a place beyond these bars."

_But I wasn't thinking that, _I wanted to tell her. _I wasn't thinking anything. _I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

"We do these things because we must, little vine. Because without us, our entire race would flounder and drown. We carry the dreams of billions on our backs, and lay our own by the wayside. Remember that."

_I will, _I thought I should tell her. But I figured she already knew.

The time for my Presentation drew nearer, Irk looming larger, the lights in my head flickering off. I heard the fightback voice less often, and I forgot more and more of what I'd done and who I'd been before I was Nine's little vine. Sometimes, my own name slipped my mind. It was easy, since no one used it anymore; to Nine, I was always _little one_ or _little vine, _and anyone else who addressed me called me _my Tallest._

It occurred to me that maybe this was why the Tallest before me were called Red and Purple. Maybe when I forgot my name completely, all I would know of myself would be my reflection in Nine's eyes.

When Nine spoke of pleasures and flesh-memories, and the girl – what was her name? – I was no longer sure what she meant. But on those nights that I didn't wake to the fightback voice, I sometimes woke to tingles crawling over my skin under my skirt (Nine deactivated the hoverrings so that I could sleep, but I was never allowed to remove my regalia), and the stutter of thickened breath reverberating through my chestplate. Fluttering with wisps of dreams that tasted of sour candy and soda fizz, a flavor not entirely unfamiliar to my tongue. Wanting something I couldn't name.

Nine said she knew what it was, and she could cure it. She unfurled her limbs from my bedroom walls and said she would break my fever, in the warm sticky dark of the night. She said that it would feel good, and no one would have to know. But for once, I said _no._

I didn't know why. How could I know to refuse, when I wasn't even sure what she was offering? How could I turn Nine away, when she always knew what was best for me? My head said _let her do it, _but my body – under the regalia and the ribbons, beneath the throbbing muscles and snapped bones, deep, deep inside where even she couldn't reach – said _no. _

Her cold prongs and tender whispers weren't what my back would have arched in search of, were it still strong enough to rise like a breaking wave. I didn't know how I knew, but I knew, and all I asked for was a dose of sedative.

Irk hung in space like a huge red eye, watching us coming home.


	21. What Had to Be Done

Yeah, that's my main issue with shipping fics, too. Not making sense, I mean. I think a lot of authors are just so desperate to get their favorite characters into a relationship that they ignore things like characterization and plot in their hurry to reach that point. I'm happy to hear I'm not one of them, at least from RKB's point of view. :)

**20. What Had to Be Done**

_Gaz speaking_

_You did this to me._

I lay curled up in the moon-bed with Tak's voice echoing in my head, nauseous with guilt. _You did this, _she'd said. _You did this. _And she was right.

It was a new emotion for me, guilt. I'd never felt guilty over anything in my life. I had screwed over lots of people, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, and never once wasted time regretting it. When April went to pieces on the sidewalk, sobbing that she'd come out to her parents because of me, I'd wrinkled my nose at the snotcicles plopping into her latte.

When I dumped Kiri the day before her sweet sixteen, I'd congratulated myself for dodging the bullet of having to buy her a birthday present. When I did a thousand and one horrible things to Dib, day in and day out, to punish him for the crime of just being Dib, I'd zone out at school thinking up a thousand and one more.

But for what I'd done to Tak, I felt guilt plunging into me like a scalpel, twisting as if to bleed me dry. And it wasn't just because I knew that if they had her, they had me, too – because if I was lucky I'd spend my life as her concubine, festooned in golden chains, and if I wasn't I'd rot in this room. It was that it had gutted me to see her broken like that, and it would have stayed with me forever even if they had let me go.

Lying there in the moon-bed, staring into the blackness behind my eyelids, feeling Mimi's equally dejected presence beside me, I came to the startling (obvious, maybe, to anyone else, but startling – and a little bit horrifying – to me) realization that I cared for Tak more than I'd ever cared for anyone. It wasn't just that she was infuriating, and challenging, and fascinating. It was that I was falling in love with her.

Fat lot of good that did anyone now. It only made things worse. Bitterly, I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for everyone if I'd just stayed home on Earth when she left—and just as soon acknowledged that from the second I met her eyes through the shadows of the factory floor, there had been no chance of that.

I got up when Rel brought lunch – another gurgling monstrosity on a tray. Not that I'd have been in much of a mood to eat anyway. "I thought I'd give it one more try," she said cheerfully, setting her tray on a floating saucer near the bed. "If you still don't like it, I can start bringing the nutrient paste you were prescribed."

"Whatever," I answered, having barely heard what she'd said. I stared at nothing and poked my finger through a hole in my tights (worrying, seeing as they were the only pair I had).

After a minute, she began to rock nervously back and forth on her heels. "Should I get the paste? I should get the paste, shouldn't I?"

Unwisely enough, I widened the hole.

"You really ought to eat, you know," Rel said, her voice rising to a panicky pitch. "I've been told to make sure you eat. I don't know much about human biology, butIknowyouhavetoeatorelseyo u'lldieandifyoudieI'llbeinreallybigtroubleso—"

Her babbling tumbled into the sigh that left my lips, so heavy it filled my ears and drowned her out. "I just don't _get_ it," I said, not necessarily to her.

"Get…g-get what, may I ask?"

_Ah, what the hell. _I didn't expect Rel to be of much help, but I figured it couldn't hurt to vent to her. "When we saw Tak, she was—weird. Not herself." I rested my elbow on my knee, my chin in my hand. "The way she spoke, the look in her eyes—it gave me goosebumps, and not the good kind. Nine must've done _something_ to her, but fuck if I know what."

Rel brightened. "Oh, you don't need to worry about that. She probably just had her signals scrambled, is all."

I frowned. "Her what?"

"It's something Nine does for the Tallest, when they get stressed out. I've never seen it, but I've heard things from the crew." She smiled, pleased as punch to be able to tell me something I didn't know. "They say she can make you feel better about nearly anything, just by looking at you. She uses some special technology, it's called—umm—what is it called? A pacemaker? A windshaker?"

It dawned on me. The one thing she hadn't been wearing, above all of that crap they had her stuffed into. "A wavebreaker?"

"That's it! A wavebreaker!" Rel shrugged. "Whatever that means."

It gutted me to think that I'd made her the _weaker life form._

Days passed. Maybe weeks. I had no means of telling the time, save for Rel's visits, and soon enough they too began to melt into each other. I ate enough of her horror-movie cooking to keep from keeling over, and after she'd gone, I paced in my cage; Mimi and I exhausted every option for escape, finding the room a fortress.

Not that it mattered. Had we found our way out via stealth or cunning or force, we'd have been herded back inside by those omnipresent guards with their cattle prods, with nothing but singed hair and bruises for our trouble.

And even if it weren't for them, what would we have _done_? What could I have said to Tak, to bring her back to who she used to be? _I'm sorry I fucked things up, but I didn't mean to, and you need to snap the hell out of this before you lose yourself forever? This isn't the destiny I meant?_ I wanted like crazy just to _talk_ to her, but how much would she even have heard?

So I waited. I languished, like Cinderella sweeping the fireplace – the last thing I'd ever wanted to be – and I picked at the run in my tights. Useless. Helpless. God, I'd never felt so fucking _helpless_ in my life.

Then one day, I woke (well, 'woke' probably wasn't the best word, since it'd imply I had something to do that would've left me tired enough to sleep – Rel had offered to get me a shot of sedative, when she saw the grey crescents under my eyes, but I'd never sleep again before I'd let her pump my veins full of Irken woozy-juice) to the distinct sensation of stillness.

You can't feel every dip and swerve of a ship as big as the Massive, but you can feel the indefinable aura of _movement_; it settles into you after a few days onboard. However dimly, I was always aware that we were in flight, until that one day when we weren't.

"We've stopped. Haven't we?" I looked at Mimi. "Why have we stopped?"

I could divine no answer from her face, save the general impression of uneasiness. So we just sat on the edge of the moon-bed, and felt uneasy together.

Until Rel appeared, bearing a tray of grey, gloppy breakfast, chattering brightly as usual. "Rise and shine!" she trilled, using one of several 'alien' phrases she'd been thrilled to pick up from me. "This is going to be good, I'm sure. I mean, I hope. I think I've got the generator on the right settings now. I was going for—uhh—scrambled eggs, so—"

"Rel, why have we stopped?"

She paused with the tray still in her hands, looking slightly disappointed that I wasn't more excited about her cooking. "Well, because we've docked at the homeworld. For the Presentation."

"The presentation of what?"

"The presentation of Tallest Tak, of course."

I felt a slow-moving frost engulf each vertebra of my spine. She might as well have told me it was an execution, for all the difference it made. "What, like a coronation?"

"Sort of. It's just a little ceremony we have so that everyone knows who the new Tallest is—so it's official." She set the tray on a floating saucer and leaned against it, sighing. "It's one of the few things we still do on Irk itself, and everybody in the whole Empire shows up for it. Almost everybody, anyway. The Massive's nearly empty, except for me and the other service drones."

"It's—what?" I furrowed my brow. "Everyone just takes off and leaves the whole Armada floating here like fish in a barrel? That's kind of dumb."

Rel shook her head quickly, rushing to the rescue of her people's pride. Had I been in a more meditative state of mind, I might have reflected on how it never got any less weird, hearing Irkens who had been royally screwed over by their empire singing its praises so passionately.

"Oh, no, no," she assured me. "It's not like that. All of the retainer vessels go down to Irk with their crews; it's just this ship that doesn't, because it's so big. And its docking station has the best automatic defenses ever devised. If a threat in any form gets within a light-year of the Massive, they'll be able to eliminate it in less time than it would take to let us know it's coming."

I considered that. "But there's no one actually _on_ the ship."

"Just you two and the service drones."

"No guards."

"No…" I knew it had clicked when her voice trailed off, her mouth hanging open midsentence. As I peered around her at her little portal in the wall, wondering exactly where her _transport tubes_ transported you to, her cotton-candy-colored eyes swirled with wounded red. "You can't get out of here, you know. Guards or no guards. The reader won't accept your palm _or_ mine."

"I know. But the main doors aren't the only way in and out, are they?"

Rel's gaze followed mine to the near-invisible indentation that was just about her size—the door I'd watched her open, after every breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a swipe of her palm. Her cheeks darkened with indignation, and she folded her arms tightly across her chest. "I'm not letting you leave."

"Why not?" I asked, swinging down from the moon-bed. "I thought you liked me."

"It doesn't matter whether or not I _like_ you. My orders are to keep you alive and keep you in this room – and if I want to keep all my bones inside my body, I don't disobey orders."

"Come on. Don't you want things to change?" Half-consciously, I found myself slipping into the tone of voice I'd always used on girls who flinched when I touched their bra clasps, or tried to drag me home to meet their families. The buttery bell-tones – fairly sickening, actually – I'd always relied on to convince anyone of anything.

"If I got out of here and managed to do what I'm hoping to, I'd be in a position to repay you for helping me. You wouldn't have to be somebody's _slave_ anymore. Don't you want to do something better with your life?"

For a second, her face sagged with sadness. "I've heard that before," she muttered, avoiding my eyes. "No one ever means it."

"I do."

She straightened up and set her jaw, fixing me with a scowl. "Well, I don't care. I'm going to do my job, and that means—"

All of a sudden – out of fucking _nowhere _– her voice stuck in her throat, and her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the floor with a _thunk. _Out cold. Blinking, wide-eyed, around the room, I turned back to the moon-bed just in time to see Mimi retracting her stun gun. Looking at me with eyes like slices of a blood orange. For the first time, her voice resonated in my head, absolutely clear:

_And I'm going to do mine._

We pressed Rel's limp hand to the reader by her door, and an arch-shaped slice of the wall slid obediently away. The tunnel beyond was long and dark, no more than three feet on all sides. Mimi went first, her quick clinking footsteps echoing back to me, her eyes filling the tube with red light, and I crawled on my hands and knees after her.

We followed the tunnel through twists and turns, unlabeled forks in the path, vertical tubes where I just managed to stand before being suddenly sucked up into a new passageway. I had no idea where we were going, or even if Mimi knew. All that mattered was that we were _doing_ something, finally, and it had to be better than sitting useless in that room.

Eventually, we squeezed ourselves through a portal that opened onto a red corridor—an unfamiliar red corridor, but that was okay. We could work with that. We decided, without speaking – without even Mimi's weird wordless way of speaking – what had to be done.

Mimi took off in one direction, and I in the other. Relying on the instincts that had shoveled us into this shit heap to dig us out again, I weaved through a maze of eerily empty hallways, and finally descended into the cool, silent darkness of the docking bay. Led only by the glow of the little lights studding the floating-saucer-cum-elevator (I really had to ask somebody what those things were actually called), I found my way to Tak's ship, sliding my palm over a wing I knew near as well as the scent of her skin.

Inside, I slid back a storage panel and grabbed my backpack, fishing through it in search of the secret weapon I'd saved for a time like this. Thus prepared, I situated myself in the cockpit, and took off to crash one hell of an Irken party.


	22. Tallest Tak

This chapter feels like an ending, but believe me, this story isn't even close to over.

**21. Tallest Tak**

_Tak speaking_

"When we give the word, you will step out and face our people. They will hail you, and you will smile, and greet them. Yes?"

Nine – or the part of Nine projected from the Massive, into this palace without wonders or flowering vines – muttered something to a passing attendant. He answered with a sharp salute and strode back in the direction from which he'd come. I stared up at the domed ceiling, through which a perfect disc of sky peered in. "Yes, Nine," I said.

"You will recite the speech we practiced, with the appropriate emphasis on the appropriate points. You will pause for applause at the right moments. You will not forget what you are to say. Yes?"

Nine unfolded a pair of silver arms from the ceiling of this palace with walls the red of human blood, and unzipped a slit at the back of my underdress. Her prongs slipped inside and, with a few tugs, tightened the bindings around my waist. I watched as pink clouds slid across the red sky, leaving it striped like the belly of a beast who made nests of worlds. "Yes, Nine," I said.

"You will not fail the Empire. You will be what it needs you to be. Yes?"

Nine's attention shifted to a window of this palace that wasn't really a palace, but a tower—a glorified pedestal—in which I would spend no more time than the time it took to be Presented, home to a hundred doors that would never be opened and a hundred rooms that would never be used. A window that wasn't really a window, but a viewscreen, hidden behind sliding panels so that she could survey the crowd without them seeing her or me seeing them. So that I wouldn't be nervous, she'd said.

"Yes, Ni—"

My answer was cut short by a loud, crashing _bang_—the sound of the doors at the other end of the hall in which we stood, being kicked rather unceremoniously open. Blinking with wide eyes at the source of the noise, I saw the last thing I'd expected to see in my place of Presentation: the human child (whatever she was called), sauntering in like the guest of honor at a party, a backpack slung over her shoulder and an empty soda can crushed in her fist.

"Hey, Sticky Tak," she said, and until she slung her arm around my shoulders, I wasn't sure who she meant. "Long time no see."

"What is this?" Nine snapped. "How did you get here?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" She narrowed her eyes at the speaker from which Nine's voice emanated, her arms glinting in the light that streamed through the dome. Both nestled amid a bed of cords and cables, like those that crowded near every ceiling in the Empire. "So I guess you must be _Nine_, right? I have to say, I expected you to be more impressive than this."

"And _we_ expected _you_ to be smarter than this." Nine's voice had suddenly become low, dangerous. The child withdrew her arm and set her jaw, unflinching. "If you were clever enough to escape the Massive," Nine said, the prongs of one arm creeping over the child's shoulder, "we would think you'd be clever enough to get as far from Irken territory as possible."

She jerked away from Nine's touch. "I'm not going anywhere without Tak."

"Then you're not going anywhere at all," Nine said silkily. "She won't listen to you."

"You don't know what you're talking about," she spat. Then, she looked at me, as I stood there glancing back and forth between the two of them and trying to figure out what was going on. I could feel a headache blooming behind my eyes. "Listen, I know she's been screwing with your head, but you've got to be stronger than she is. I don't care how many waves she's broken – I'm not going to let you let her make you her bitch."

Her words went to mush in my brain nearly as soon as she said them, like soft fruits flung against a stone wall. Confused, fumbling for something to say, I turned to Nine for help. "I don't—"

"Fuck you, don't look at _her_!" the child snapped, grabbing me by the arm, yanking me back around to face her. Irrelevantly enough, I found myself noticing how warm her fingers were, in contrast to Nine's prongs.

"I _know_ you don't want to live like this," she said (as if she were, for some reason, _angry_ with me), "and so do you. Don't you _want_ to make your own choices? Don't you want to stand up straight, and walk on your own goddamn feet? Don't you want to be able to hear yourself _think_, without this brainwashing bitch jabbering in your—"

"_Enough!_"

A snarling shout filled the speaker and one of Nine's cables shot down from the ceiling, engulfing the child in its coils. In the space of a second, she had her trapped in a constricting column of sinuous steel, tight around her body so that she couldn't struggle, slapped over her mouth so that she couldn't speak. She hung there, suspended like a fly wrapped in spider's-silk, glaring at Nine as she hissed.

"You've long since worn out your welcome here, human filth. We were keeping you alive as a favor to Tallest Tak—but seeing as you are _determined _to make yourself a problem, _we_ are going to be the solution."

But she paused. With the child in her grip, she paused—and when she spoke again, it was gentle. When she spoke again, it was to me.

"A thought occurs to us, little one," she said, her voice wrapping itself around me like a flowering vine. "We told you that we would allow you to keep the girl, if it pleased you, and we do not wish to renege on our promise. So you tell us—what shall we do with her?"

The child's eyes snapped open wide, flicking from Nine to me. I shrank under her gaze. "You could be rid of her forever," Nine whispered, the suggestion of a smile in her tone. "It would be easy. Do you know how little force it would take to crush the air from her lungs?

"You don't _really _want her around, do you? Always doubting you, trying to tear you down? Telling you you're _wrong_?" I saw the child wince as Nine tightened the cable. "You don't need her, little vine. You don't need anyone but us."

The child stared down at me, the whites of her eyes bright around brown centers. Human eyes. I thought about human eyes, and how much they revealed – how easy it was to read volumes in their whites and pupils and irises, compared to the jewel-toned discs that were Irken eyes.

Looking into hers, I saw fury and fear and sadness, and the desperate desire to do what she should have known was impossible. I felt her reach out to me with those eyes, and for a moment, I wished I could remember why it might've pleased me to keep her. Why she didn't want to leave here without me. What we'd meant to each other, sometime-not-now.

I wished I knew where it came from—the memory of her eyes gleaming in a sea of shadows, searching (for me?) in a dust-cloaked room. Her eyes an inch from mine, heavy-lidded half-moons, and the taste of sour candy and soda fizz. Her eyelids fluttering open as she woke, for some reason beside me.

Human eyes – however familiar, however pleading, however golden-brown-like-coins-of-amber-frozen-around-silk-wrapped-flies – couldn't help me now.

"Don't hurt her," I said quietly, dropping the girl's gaze. "I don't…want her to die."

Nine sounded surprised. "Oh?"

"Don't hurt her," I went on, "but don't keep her here anymore. Just—send her away. Somewhere I won't have to see her again."

The energy in the room shifted, palpably enough that even I, numb as I was, could perceive it. The smile returned to Nine's invisible lips. Her grip on the child eased. And the child, with her human eyes, regarded me with a conflation of emotions too dense to unravel in a glance: frustration, disappointment, pity. Unwavering determination. Shame. Not as if she were ashamed, but as if she were ashamed of _me_. As if I'd let her down.

"I need Nine," I said softly, when her gaze demanded an explanation. "I can't do this alone."

Nine's cable began to uncoil slowly, smugly, freeing the child's mouth first. "You wouldn't be alone," she said.

"Shut your insolent mouth, Earth vermin," Nine said. "Tallest Tak has made her choice."

The child glowered at her, muttering something I couldn't make out under her breath. "Well, can I at least do one last thing before I go?"

Nine unwound what remained of her coils in one sharp jerk, dumping the child head-over-heels onto the floor. As she clambered to her feet, teeth grit, rubbing a bruise on her elbow, Nine barked out a laugh. "What would you do? You think you can kiss her and break the spell, like in your human fairy tales? The only thing you need to _do_ is learn to lose gracefully, because—"

All of a sudden, the child leapt up onto one of Nine's arms, and her voice broke into an infuriated growl. As she tried to shake her off, the child scrambled up high enough to plunge her hands into the cluster of cables from which Nine's limbs sprouted, her wrists twitching with the quick movements of fingers hidden from my sight. Seconds later, Nine got her prongs around her and peeled her off with her other arm, flinging her to the floor.

"Foolish little rat," she hissed, as the child hit the ground with an audibly painful _thud_. "What did you expect to do? Did you think you could rid yourself of me by disconnecting a few wires? Even if you _were_ smart enough to cut my link to this facility, my consciousness would merely return to the Massive. Get this through your thick human skull, stupid girl: _you will never_ _escape the network. _We will _never die_."

The child said nothing. She just lifted her chin towards the ceiling, and I looked—and saw, from a gap in the cables that still held the shape of her hands, a small screen descend and unfold.

A drop of uncertainty diluted the venom in Nine's voice. "What…?"

An image flickered onto the screen: a little silver SIR unit, with red eyes and a cabled claw for a right hand. The plates on its head were open, giving way to a waterfall of cords, and it was hooked up to a console in the shadow of an intubated orb.

I watched as the SIR's hand danced deftly across a control panel, letters and signals whirling by too fast for my fruit-mush brain to comprehend. "What do you think you're doing?" Nine shrieked, rage and panic (panic? But wasn't that the same as fear? It couldn't be—Nine wasn't afraid of anything) rising in her voice. "You can't do this to me! I'll—"

The speaker and her limbs burst into a convulsion of electricity, cutting Nine off. When her voice returned, it filtered through the speaker in a desperate, furious snarl. "You'll NEVER get rid of us! It doesn't matter what you do to me! The rest of the network will have you PUT TO DEATH for this!

"YOU SAID IT YOURSELF!" she howled. "YOU _NEED ME_! THE _EMPIRE_ NEEDS ME! _YOU CAN'T DO IT ALONE_!"

The SIR's hand came down on hard on the control panel, and it filled with a blinking red light. The screen cut to black.

Nine's arms went limp.

The speaker was silent.

"Nine?" My voice suddenly seemed to echo. An overwhelming sense of emptiness swept through the hall, as though a great presence had gone from the air. "I don't…where…?"

The hoverrings shorted out spontaneously, and my knees buckled beneath me. I found myself on the floor, my head swimming, my vision doubling and going fuzzy. My head throbbed like my brain was trying to squish itself out through my eye sockets. It felt as if something were being sucked out of me by a vacuum, a sound of tiny glowing fish dragged up in a trawl net—or maybe it was something taking flight from me, spreading huge heavy wings and disappearing through the dome in the ceiling. The emptiness in the hall poured into me, then drained out of me, leaving me rinsed and exhausted.

And aware of this crushing, crippling pain, closing in on me from all sides. Aware, too, of Gaz sitting on the floor a few feet from me, her eyebrows raised, her eyes on me. "What happened?" I asked, my voice emerging weaker than I would've liked. "Where have I been?"

She smiled. "Doesn't matter. You're back now."

Climbing to her feet, she came over and offered her hand to me. I took it – well, gripped it as best I could, with two fingers and no thumb – and tried to pull myself up. But no sooner did I slide my feet under me than the pain redoubled, every bone in my body threatening to snap under my weight, and I winced as I dropped her hand. "No good," I said, shaking my head. "I can't stand up."

"Well, let's get you out of that shit, then," she said, lowering herself to her knees. "No offense, but you're kind of grossing me out anyway."

"None taken."

Kneeling beside me, she took my hand in hers and cracked open the armlet, sighing when she saw the bandaged bundle it concealed. "In answer to your first question," she said as she began to unwrap the ribbon, slowly easing the pressure on my thumb, "_what happened_ was, Mimi and me saved your ass. You're welcome."

When she had finished with my right hand, she started on my left. "There was nobody left onboard the Massive to stop her, so Mimi hacked Nine's defense systems. Cut off her comm links and her life support. Won't be a fun way to go." She snorted. "Can't say I feel bad."

"She said she'd lived for millennia. I suppose that's long enough."

"Too long, if you ask me." Once it was freed, she lifted my left hand and pressed her lips to the cleft between my fingers, her eyelids drifting shut. I felt the faintest little shudder course through her, and the throbbing in my thumb began to fade. "Okay," she said after a few seconds, recovering quickly. "Scoot around."

That, at least, I could do. I turned so that she could unlatch my chestplate, and tug the hoverrings up high enough for them to expand and slip off over my head; then, she unzipped my underdress, to unlace the bindings around my neck and midsection. Gently, carefully, so that I didn't fall apart the moment the ribbons came off.

She undid the layers a little at a time, each loop unwound exposing a little more hot, sticky skin to the cool air, allowing more of my bones to slide back into place. Drawing in a little more breath, and pushing out a little more muscle. It hurt, but this pain was a constructive pain, a finally-getting-somewhere pain – almost pleasant, in its intrinsic promise to heal.

Irken physiology was, in general, more elastic than that of most creatures, but there were still broken bones and bruised tissue that would require laser therapy to heal completely. That, though, could wait until later. Now, at least, I was strong enough to get to my feet – albeit slowly, with no small amount of strain, and Gaz's arm around my shoulders – and put on the clothes she'd brought for me in her backpack, one of the sets I'd stored in my ship.

"Nice of you to bring my clothes," I noted as I pulled on my gloves, appreciating her foresight.

"Yeah, well. You can't be Presented naked, right?"

I froze with one glove halfway up my arm, blinking at her. "You can't be serious."

"Serious as a heart attack."

"I thought you said this _wasn't our scene_!"

"I said Nine jerking you around like a puppet wasn't our scene. _This_ is entirely different." She nodded at the sliding doors in the outer wall, leading out onto the platform on which I was going to be Presented. "There are a billion little bug monsters out there waiting for you, and they came a long, long way just to see your pretty face. Are you going to let them down?"

Sort of numbly, I rolled my glove up all the way, staring at Gaz all the while. She looked back at me, _serious as a heart attack._ "You know," I said, after a minute of silence, "Nine was right. The rest of the control brain network is still active. If we don't get out of here now, we'll be in for a lot worse than bindings and locked rooms."

Gaz rested her hand on my arm. "Come here. I want to show you something."

She steered me over to the viewscreen through which Nine had been keeping tabs on my audience. When the panels retracted, I caught my breath. As far and as wide as my eyes could see, the ground below the tower was carpeted with people, innumerable green heads and expectant, jewel-toned eyes, all turned towards the platform. Waiting for me.

They had no idea what had happened – of what had died and been born while they were docking their ships, of the raw, wet, startling newness of the world outside their barrels of nachos – and they were still _waiting for me. _

"You see all those people?" she said. "Those people are just like you were, before we came here. They don't know what Nine really was. They believe that the Tallest is Almighty. To every last wriggly green nub in the whole of the Irken Empire, you're pretty much God, and they're going to do anything you tell them." She lifted her eyebrows. "Besides, the network isn't here. _You_ are."

Leaning against me, she laid her cheek against my shoulder, half-smiling out at the swarm in the plaza. "I think that whyever you ended up here – with the power to take your empire in any direction you want – you ended up here for a reason. I think this was your destiny all along."

_Your empire. _

I weighed the options in my head. We could play it safe and, as Nine had advised Gaz, get as far from Irken territory as possible. We could spend the rest of our lives, however long that was, drifting from planet to planet, making camp every night in a different desert or jungle or cave. We could let the past few weeks fade gently into myth, into a story we told each other over the campfire, until, having lost interest in dusting it off, we folded it up and packed it away.

We could pretend it had been a strange dream and learn nothing from it, save that there were some foods we shouldn't eat before bed. Everything we'd been through could be for nothing—and when we died, history could swallow us whole.

Or we could gamble our lives and the Irken Empire on the chance that I could do what Nine said I couldn't.

Having never been one to avoid my obstacles, I sucked in and blew out a deep breath, and stepped out through the doors onto the platform. The crowd – the staggering sum of my people, rolling out into the horizon – erupted in a roar.

"Today," I said, hearing _my_ words – not Nine's – boom out through the sound amplifiers ringing the platform, "we embark on a new journey. This dawn is the dawn of a new era, and today, we are no longer a nation of children. Today, we come out from under the shadow of our own cowardice, and slothfulness, and stupidity. Today is the day we take our destiny into our own hands.

"I'm not going to give a long speech about what I'm going to do for you, or what you're going to do for me. I'm just going to say one thing." I paused to roll the words around in my mouth before I spoke them, wanting to remember how they felt. "I am Almighty Tallest Tak, and I command you to go forth and tear down the control brain network, so that _we_ will be the only ones to decide our fates."

The crowd thundered with agreement and adoration, unconditional, unrestrained. Wanting to do it because _I_ told them to do it. Ready to cast their lives at my feet.

_My _people. _My_ empire. _My destiny._


	23. A Fully-Assimilated Imitation Irken

**22. A Fully-Assimilated Imitation Irken**

_Gaz speaking_

I woke up slowly, luxuriating in the slow-clearing mist of sleep. For awhile, I didn't open my eyes. When I did, they registered the world gradually, in bits and pieces: the lavender dome of the ceiling, geometric panels dividing it like a parasol. The little lights that glowed where the floors met the walls, creating the impression of sun filtering in.

The bed, round, big enough for roughly eighty-five humans or Playmates From Beyond the Stars and maybe a hundred and fifty pipsqueak Irkens. The blanket half in a heap on the floor, half tangled around us, nubbly-soft like velvet against my bare skin.

And my girlfriend, who owned the universe.

Tak was still asleep, curled up with her head buried in a pillow and most of the rest of her wrapped up in her section of the blanket, looking fairly magnificent if you asked me. I decided I had to wake her up. Spooning up to her back, I slid my arms around her waist and burrowed my face into the crook of her neck, kissing and sucking and biting until I felt her stir against me.

"Detach yourself, child," she muttered into the pillow, swatting at me halfheartedly with one hand. "I'm still asleep."

"Got to get up, Sticky. We run an empire now, remember? No time for sleeping in."

She snorted. "What's this _we _business? _I_ run an empire. You're just along for the ride."

"Well, seeing as you wouldn't run shit if it weren't for me, I'm counting myself as an equal partner here. Get used to it." Reassessing the situation, I scooted back, rolled her over, and situated myself on top of her, resting my chin on her chest. "So what am I supposed to call you now, anyway?"

She blinked down at me, still groggy. "What?"

"What's your title? I mean, is it like 'your majesty' or 'your eminence' or 'your most exalted royal Irken-ness' or what?"

Her cheeks colored slightly. "Uh, that would be 'my Tallest.' But please don't call me that."

"How about 'my Stickiest'?"

"How about just Tak?"

"Ugh. That's no fun." I sighed and let my forehead flop down onto her collarbone, squishing my face into her chest. Of all mornings, that wasn't a morning to complain, but I found myself momentarily reflecting on the sad, sad fact that I would never again bury my head in a nice pair of tits.

"God, I'm _starving_," I groaned, suddenly aware of the gurgling pit in my stomach. I couldn't remember when I'd last eaten something that wasn't Rel's food-shaped sewer sludge. "Isn't there _anything_ I can eat on this hunk of junk?"

"Oh! That reminds me." Tak shoved me off of her and slid to the edge of the bed, fetching her clothes from the floor where I'd dumped them last night. "I have an idea," she said as she pulled on her leggings. "Get dressed and let's go."

Mystified though I was, I did, and soon I was following her out into the web of hallways that made up the interior of the Massive. Having been locked up since the first day, I didn't know where anything was, and I figured Tak had only been where Nine had shepherded her. That much proved true when she stopped a crew member a few corridors in, to ask him something in Irken beginning with _where is._

The rest of what she said, I didn't understand, and when he answered I didn't catch much of it, either, save for that he punctuated his response with _my Tallest_. As he marched off down the hallway, Tak winced.

"You know," I said as we moved on, looping my arm through hers, "if you're going to call yourself that in front of the entire Empire, you should probably get used to hearing it from the crew."

"Yes, I _know_."

I grinned. "I mean, it _is _a new era, after all."

"Would you shut up?"

We came to a set of double-doors, with Irken letters scrolling by on the control panel outside them. She swiped her palm across it and the doors opened, revealing a long, low-ceilinged room with a tiled floor and purple-paneled walls, dimly-lit by glowing pink stripes that ran the circumference of the room.

From the equipment that seemed to stand against every inch of the wall – worktables cluttered with vials and beakers, tools hooked up to wires that descended from the ceiling, thick glass tubes that passed globs of bubbly liquid from the ceiling to the floor – and the begoggled Irkens that scurried from one blinking console to the next, I concluded that it was some kind of lab. Though what she wanted with a lab (and what it had to do with my being hungry) I didn't know.

I trailed Tak to a workstation with all the trappings of B-movie alien experimentation: wires, tubes and all. "So what exactly are we doing here?" I asked as she began to navigate the station's control panel, her fingers darting over the icons on the screen.

"I'm going to make you a pak."

My eyes widened. "You are?"

"Yes, now that I'm in a position to. It's really past time you had one. You'll have a hard time getting by in Irken society without it." A port beside the control panel irised open to release a thick, orange beam of light, into which rose a ladybug like the one nesting on her back (though unlike hers, this one was black, with magenta spots). She removed it from the beam and set it down on the table, with a fluidity of movement that implied it wasn't very heavy. "I should be able to modify the basic template enough to make it work for you."

I thought about that. "You're not going to suck my brain out and stick it in there, are you?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, I'm not going to _suck your brain out and stick it in there. _That's why I'm modifying the template – removing the life-support and biodata-storage components that usually come standard in a pak. I'm just going to program it to assist you with things that would be difficult otherwise."

With a brush of her hand, the ports on the pak flipped open. She pulled a cable down from the ceiling and activated the tool attached to it, a humming silver stylus not much bigger than a ballpoint pen. It disappeared into the circuitry inside the central port, _zrrt_ingand _zap_ping as she worked, spitting intermittent flurries of blue sparks.

"Once you've got a pak," she said, "you won't have to worry about eating anymore; I'll adapt a supply of fuel cells to your physiology and you can just reload like we do. It'll also alter your body chemistry to allow you to safely consume Irken food.

"You won't need to sleep as often, and you'll be able to speak and understand any language once you've heard it. And I was thinking I'd see if I can't formulate some kind of bio-booster to add to the fuel cell – an anti-aging agent, if you will – so that your pathetic human lifespan won't have you going senile just as I'm hitting my stride."

"Sweet." Charitably enough, I chose not to make fun of her for having admitted that she liked me enough to want to keep me around a good while, instead wrapping and shelving the fact for when I might need a flicker of warmth on a cold day. "And will I have spider-legs?"

She sighed. "Yes, child, you will have _spider-legs_."

"Well, hot damn. I'm sold."

I stood peering over her shoulder as she _modified the basic template_, watching her stylus flit in and out of the three ports, the sparks it sent off surrounding the pak with a blue glow. At one point, she turned it over and applied a different tool to the pair of anchor-points on the back. Eventually, she let the cables snap back into the ceiling, and pressed the ports shut; after giving the pak a once-over with something that looked like a supermarket price-scanner, she glanced up at me.

"Ready?"

"Sure."

"Good. Turn around."

I did and she tugged down the back of my tank top, far enough to expose most of my upper back. Of course, she also had to undo my bra clasp, and I found myself clutching the cups somewhat awkwardly to my chest (as, for the first time, it occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to wear a bra at all anymore). I felt her press the pak to my back, its anchor points directly between my shoulder blades, then twin stabs of pain as they connected.

It wasn't bad, though – no worse than the first prick of a tattoo gun – and it faded quickly, leaving me with a not-unpleasant tingling around the anchor points. I also discovered that the pak, even more so than her handling of it had suggested, was very light. I'd always thought it would be annoying, to have to lug it around with you all the time, but I could see myself forgetting it entirely.

"Now, it should automatically establish a link with your neural system, so you can command its components as you would one of your limbs. It'll take some getting used to – you'll have to concentrate, at first – but after awhile, you'll won't even have to think about it." She spun me around and inspected me, cocking her head to one side. "Let's test it, shall we? Show me something."

"What?"

"Anything. Just so I know it's working."

_Concentrate, _she'd said. So I concentrated on how frickin' cool it would be if I had spider-legs, and it wasn't a second before I heard that telltale _shlick_ing sound hers always made popping out—except that this time they were_ mine_, and let me tell you, it was pretty sweet.

I could feel them sliding out of the ports, and as they extended, I developed a sense of where they were in the space around me. I didn't have sensation in them, exactly, but I was as intrinsically _aware _of them as I was of any other part of my body.

I tested them by unfurling a few over her head, threading their tips through the spirals of her antennae, and giving them an exultant jerk. She shrieked and whipped around, smacking the limbs away, as I made absolutely no effort not to laugh. "Hey, what do you know?" I said with a grin, retracting my spider-legs into the pak. "It works. Now I can irritate you from twice the distance."

She scowled at me. "Why must you always make me regret being nice to you?"

I wiggled my eyebrows. "Hey, there's a lot I could do to you with these things. Just be glad I left you with this much dignity, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, I'm sure that soon enough, you won't hesitate to show me every obscene use you can think of for the technology integral to my peoples' lives. In the meantime, if you're going to make lewd comments, at least make them in Irken, so I know the language processing system is functioning."

Considering that, I began trying to put together a sentence in Irken, with the limited range of words and phrases she'd taught me. As never before, the words I wanted sprang to my tongue automatically, without my even having to think about them. "How's this?" I said, in a language that was very distinctly foreign, yet rang as clear in my head and my ears as the English I'd spoken all my life. "Is it working?"

"It's working," she confirmed, in Irken I could suddenly understand, and heaved a sigh of relief. "Finally. I was getting fed up with having to speak to you in English constantly."

"What, so I'm not allowed to speak English anymore?"

"Do you _want_ to?"

I felt one of my bra straps slip down over my shoulder and tried to tug it back up, using the crease of my elbow to keep myself from spilling out of my admittedly (probably unwisely) low-cut tank. "Well, what I _want _right now is to not be on the verge of flashing all your little lab monkeys here, so if you don't mind…?"

"Right, right. We'll go make you a new outfit."

I followed her out of the lab, down a corridor and across a deck to another room. This one was smaller than the lab, dominated by a purple beam of light – like the one from which she'd plucked the pak template, only thicker around than both of us side-by-side, rising from the floor into the ceiling. "What the hell is this thing?" I asked as she approached a console stationed in front of it.

"It's a matter generator."

"A _matter generator_?" I snorted. I remembered having heard Rel talk about matter generators before, but I'd assumed she was just being stupid. "Are you serious?"

"It's not so ridiculous as all that. It's not as if it generates _any_ kind of matter – just little things, like tools and snacks and clothes. And one must know how to use it properly to generate anything at all." She tapped the console's control panel to wake it up. "Irken fabric is engineered to accommodate the pak, so you'll be able to wear whatever we produce. I'll show you some options, and you can tell me when something looks good."

So I stood behind her, my arms twined around her waist, my head wedged into the space between her neck and her shoulder, as she flipped through a series of screens on the console – a hundred different clothing templates for my body size and shape. After awhile, I grew tired of scrubbing my chin against her shoulder to let her know I was shaking my head, figuring she'd know I would speak up when something that appealed to my sensibilities popped up.

"So what am I going to _do_?" I said to break the silence, after what must've been the fiftieth vetoed alien fashion disaster.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you've landed yourself a pretty exciting job here, my Tallest," I said, adding the last bit just to feel the muscles in her neck twitch. "But what about me? I'm not just going to hang out around here being your royal consort. You've got to give me something to do."

"How about this one?" I grunted a _no_ to the image on the screen, and she sighed. "Fine. What would you like to do, child?"

"I don't know. Something fun."

"That's helpful."

"Okay, okay. Umm—I want a job where I can use my skills. Like…Minister of Soda and Video Games. Or something."

I could hear her rolling her eyes. "Because that's definitely a position in the Irken power structure."

"Well, there's got to be _something _seventeen years of shishkebabing were-pigs qualifies me to do." Just then, she scrolled onto an ensemble that actually caught my interest, and I added, "That one doesn't look too bad."

"All right." She swiped her finger over a blinking icon beside the template, and I peeled myself off of her back to watch as it flickered into existence in the beam.

The outfit I'd chosen was a purple dress that fell to mid-thigh, with fine black horizontal stripes. It was mostly form-fitting, but had skirt enough to swish, and a high-necked lavender cape collar. Under the collar and skirt vanished long black gloves and leggings, apparently a staple of Irken fashion; the longer I spent around these people, the surer I grew that I was scandalizing them just by showing skin below my neck.

"Still acceptable?" Tak asked.

"Sure. What the hell."

She reached into the beam and pulled out the outfit's components one by one, handing them to me. Stripping off my tank and my skirt, I slipped into the leggings and a pair of black boots, then wriggled into the dress. Sure enough, I could feel the fabric irising open around the pak (I wondered when I'd get used to thinking of it as _mine_), then sucking in under it and conforming to the anchor points. I pushed my fingers into the gloves and rolled them up over my arms.

Tak folded her arms, stood back and looked at me, obviously enjoying how I looked as a Fully-Assimilated Imitation Irken. Part of me smirked inwardly, imagining how Dib's jaw would drop if he could see me now. Another part wondered if Tak might glue a pair of pipe cleaners to a headband and stick it on my head.

"I could make you a fleet commander," she said suddenly.

"Hm?"

"You think that toy I broke made you a good strategist? Let's put that to the test." She lifted her eyelids as if to raise her nonexistent eyebrows. "I command the Armada, but we have numerous other fleets across the universe and numerous military operations to conduct. Or is that too intimidating a prospect for you?"

"Psh, are you kidding?" I scoffed, already energized at the thought. "Intimidating is my middle name."

"That's unlikely."

"But appropriate. I'll command the fuck out of your fleets, Sticky."

With that decided (who knew it'd be so easy for me to get my first job?), we abandoned the matter generator and headed back to the lab, so that Tak could get started churning me out some fuel cells. She strode across the deck purposefully, her mind as ever on her destination. Hungry though I was, I dawdled behind her.

I strolled in the swathe she cut through the crew, the _clack_ of her boots sending her subjects scattering to give her room to pass. On one side of the deck, a chick with a tablet inspected a small army of robots, each bearing a stack of crates. On the other, a headset guy conferred with a pair of guards.

A service drone emerged from the wall and hurried over to a section of the crew clustered around a large screen, balancing a tray of plastic cups on his head. A white SIR unit with pink eyes bolted, shrieking, out of one hallway and down another, pursued by a desperate-looking crew member with a translucent pink helmet tucked under one arm.

I wondered when I'd get used to thinking of this as _home._


	24. The Inaugural Month

**23. The Inaugural Month**

"Do you have everything?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, _Mom_, I have everything. Extra lunch money and my name on my underwear."

Tak scowled. "Well, forgive me for being somewhat uneasy about sending a seventeen-year-old human child out to take over my counter-resistance operations."

She folded her arms across her chest, surveying me and the threshold on which I stood – a far easier feat now that we'd finally figured how to switch on the lights in the docking bay. She'd designed this ship herself, but she still had misgivings (and not just about the traditional Irken insignia I'd badgered her into swapping for a skull). "Are you sure you can handle this?"

I leaned against the frame of the sliding side panel, grinning. "Aww. Are you actually worried about me?"

"I'm _worried_ about my fleet."

"Really? I think you're just worried about what you're going to do for fun once I'm gone."

Ignoring that, she bit down on her lower lip, drumming her fingers against her forearm. "Are you sure you won't at least take Mimi with you?"

"I'm sure. You'll need her more than I will."

Given what had happened the last time she'd been without either of us, I wasn't going to take any chances. I _knew _I could handle whatever the coming month threw at me, but I had my own misgivings when it came to Tak. It wasn't like I was going to stick around and babysit her, but seeing as she still twitched when anyone addressed her as _my Tallest, _I figured she could use Mimi to remind her to pop a chill pill now and then.

"All right, all right. Fine." Still she was looking at me, uncertain, too close to the threshold for me to shut the panel. "Was there…anything else?"

"No. For the thousandth time, I'm—" I cut myself off, a lightbulb flickering on in my head. "Actually, there was. You have to give Rel a better job before I get back."

"Who on Irk is Rel?"

"The service drone who looked after Mimi and me while Nine had us locked up. I told her I'd put in a good word for her if she let us out, and she didn't think I would, so I'm kind of itching to prove her wrong."

Tak narrowed her eyes. "She _let you out_? That's disobeying orders! I'm not going to _reward_ a service drone for disobeying orders."

I looked at her incredulously, having never felt quite so strong an urge to smack some sense into her. Just as soon, though, I reminded myself that it would've been pointless; when she put on her _champion-of-stupid-Irken-priorities_ hat, there was no making her listen to reason. "Well, that's the thing," I said, taking the route I knew would better appeal to her twisted sensibilities. "She _didn't_ let us out. I tried to convince her to, but she wouldn't disobey her orders; it was only thanks to Mimi's stun gun that we escaped."

"Well." She chewed on her lip and frowned at her feet, like a child trying to stall for another story before bed. "Be that as it may—I don't know. I can't _promote_ a service drone. It just isn't done."

I ran my tongue thoughtfully along the roof of my mouth, then leaned over the threshold, caught her face in my hands, and kissed her. "If you do," I purred against her lips, softly enough that the crew inside the ship wouldn't hear, "I'll…" I murmured something I knew would liquefy her in an instant—a particularly tantalizing teaspoon of fuel for the fantasies she'd never admit she had, to make sure she woke up thinking of me on every one of the next thirty mornings. "…when I get back."

Her eyes widened. Then, she squeezed them shut, shuddering. "Fine," she said, a little thickly. "_Fine_. Just go."

I gave her another, lighter kiss, and smiled. "If you insist."

Thus, I went. In my very own ship with my very own crew and my very own skull insignia emblazoned on the wing, I took off for the Zork nebula (gotta love that Irken naming aesthetic), where the Empire's counter-resistance operations were currently based.

On the way there, the crew briefed me on the situation. The Irken Empire, being in general as oppressive of the rest of the universe as it was of its own people, had encountered rebellion within its territories since the early days of its expansion. The fleet Tak had put me in charge of was commissioned specifically to crush such rebellion wherever it cropped up – most recently, the Zork nebula.

So as the new commander (what had happened to the _old_ commander?), my job was to devise and implement a strategy that would scrape these scum-sucking resistance pigs from the boot of the Empire, preferably as quickly as possible. Which sounded like fun to me. After all, I didn't particularly care about the politics at play here, who was in the moral wrong or right; I just wanted to blow shit up.

We docked first on a planet called Wurch, where the fleet was waiting to meet its new commander. More specifically, waiting to be _addressed _by its new commander. Which meant I was going to have to give a speech.

Inside the temporary military complex erected on Wurch, I peered out from behind a wall-panel at the assembly of shrimpy lizards whose respect I would have to earn. _Easy, _I decided, striding out towards the dais at which I was to speak. _These guys won't know what hit 'em._

I hopped onto the hoverdisc (hoverdiscs, _that's_ what the floating saucers were called) that took me up to the dais, and situated myself behind the podium, gripping it with both hands. "I am Most Exalted Royal Fleet Commander, Were-Pig Shishkebaber, and Fucker of Your Leader Gaz, and you are all my bitches. Understood?"

There might've been a little bit lost in translation (did you know _splunk _is the Irken equivalent of _fuck_? I didn't, until it popped out of my mouth), but I felt sure they got the message. The crowd stared up at me, speechless. Well, except for one guy in the back, who pumped his fist and shouted, "WOO!"

"Now, obviously I'm not Irken, but don't think that means you don't have to take me seriously. I can and will fuck you up if you give me a reason to. Plus, Tallest Tak is my girlfriend, which means I'm at the top of the food chain—which means there's no appealing any and all ass-whoopings I decide to dish out.

"The good news is, I'm not going to have to whoop your scaly green asses, because you're not going to disappoint me. You're going to do exactly as I tell you, and when we're done here, nobody in the Zork nebula will remember the _word_ 'resistance.' And then we'll all go home and eat pizza and nachos. Sound good?"

The crowd exchanged glances, murmurs rippling from row to row. Then, they turned back to me, and burst into cheering, screaming applause.

I grinned. _Easy._

So we kicked some rebel ass, because what else would we do with me at the helm? Tak had meant it semi-sarcastically, but my experiences with video games weren't so far from the real thing – I could draw up a plan of attack on the resistance's forces as well as on a horde of rabid ghost pigs, and I could practically hear the _bla-ding _of points being added to my score with every rebel cruiser my ship's lasers hit. As I sat back in the cockpit, my boots landing with a satisfied _thunk_ on the dashboard, the wreckage of rebel ships drifting past my windshield, I decided I could see myself doing this for awhile.

By the time we were heading back to the Armada, a few days short of the month we'd estimated we'd need, I'd struck up a good rapport with the fleet I was commanding. I taught them the old "the peasants are revolting" joke, ordered a few rounds of cheesy fries, and they were eating out of my hands. As for Tak, we'd kept in touch the first week or so, but I hadn't heard much from her recently.

Last I'd heard, she had grudgingly informed Rel that her rank would be bumped up to member of the general crew—to which Rel had reacted with shock and mortification, assuring Tak that really, she didn't deserve to be promoted. Tak had agreed that no, she didn't, but she was going to be anyway, so she'd better shut up and deal with it or else she'd get demoted back to service drone, and she didn't want _that_, did she?

The crew brought my ship into the docking bay and began to perform routine cleaning and tune-ups, and I headed for the upper decks. My time with the fleet had been fun (and I realized I'd really needed it, after spending so long cooped up, frustrated and impotent, in the room with the moon-bed), but I was looking forward to seeing Tak, and finding out how her inaugural month had played out. Not to mention making good on my little promise.

The moment the hoverdisc deposited me on the first deck, Mimi was _zzt_ing over to me. "Hey," I greeted her, faintly surprised to see her down here so soon. _Was she _waiting_ for me?_ "What's up, Mimi? You're on the ball today."

I couldn't always hear her voice like I did after she knocked Rel out, and after a month away, I was really out of practice. But I could've seen the stormclouds in her eyes a mile away.

"Commander Gaz!" I heard Rel's familiar squeal from behind me, the quick _clickety-clack_ of her footsteps as she rushed up to me. "Finally!" she said breathlessly, skidding to a stop. "We've been waiting for you!"

"You don't have to call me _Commander_, Rel. Gaz is just fine." Rel held out a plastic cup (old habits die hard, I guess) and I took it gladly; thanks to my pak, Irken soda no longer tasted like turpentine. "What's going on? Waiting for me why?"

Rel and Mimi looked at each other, Mimi's eyes sagging, Rel biting her lower lip. "You have to do something," Rel finally said. "Things are bad."

Mimi turned to head down a corridor off the main deck, so we followed her. Rel wrung her hands beside me, and I slurped my soda and sighed. "Okay. Bad how?"

"Well, things started out okay. After you left, Tallest Tak began to attend to her duties – putting everything in order now that the control brain network's been shut down. She was busy, at first, but it wasn't a _bad_ kind of busy – she was here and there and everywhere, taking care of this thing and that, and I think Mimi was helping her. Weren't you, Mimi?"

Mimi nodded, and Rel blinked anxiously up at me. "But we haven't seen her for _days._ I mean, at first we saw her less and less, and she spoke less when we did, and she seemed—_weird_, I don't know. But maybe a week ago she locked herself in one of the hollow interface rooms, and told everyone to leave her alone.

"She's been sending and receiving transmissions, but she won't open the doors for anyone, not even Mimi. We're starting to get worried. I mean, I know she wants to do things differently, but she can't be the Almighty Tallest if no one ever _sees_ her."

I groaned with exasperation, raking a hand through my hair. I'd had my hunches about what she'd do left to her own devices, and (surprise, surprise) they'd been right. "God. I should've known she'd pull a stunt like this."

"Do—do you think you can talk to her?"

"You mean talk her down? Yeah, yeah. If it's what it sounds like, I doubt she'll let me in, but I've finagled my way past tighter security than the reader on a hollow interface room." I shook my head. "Poor crazy Sticky Tak. I guess this is why she didn't pick up when I called."

Mimi led us to Tak's hideout and I banged my fist a few times against the doors, figuring I should at least knock before I let myself in. "Hey, Sticky! You going to let me in, or will I have to storm the place?"

She didn't answer. Thus, I proceeded with my Recipe for Breaking Into Tak's Secret Clubhouse: a tablespoon of the automatic screwdriver in my pak, reaching out on a silver limb to loosen the reader's screenplate from its frame. Half a cup of Irken soda splashed on the wiring underneath, not as toxic as Earth soda but just as incompatible with electronics. And a pinch of the heel of my boot slammed into the smoking circuitry, filling the air with a shower of sparks.

Mix well and bake at 350 for thirty minutes, and I had myself a pair of very agreeable doors. "Wait here," I instructed Rel and Mimi as I slipped into the room.

Inside, it was dark, lit only by the glow of an enormous screen papering one wall. At least twice the size of the biggest movie screen on Earth, it flickered with a hundred different windows layered one on top of the other, a hundred different applications running at the same time.

There were spreadsheets, diagrams, and maps; open transmissions with someone chattering in Irken and video feeds of areas in which no one was looking at the camera; documents with text scrolling by at twelve jillion letters a second, and documents with cursors blinking at the ends of unfinished words. It made my head hurt just looking at it.

Tak floated on a small hoverdisc about halfway up the screen, arguing with someone looking out from a transmission window. I wrinkled my nose at a new addition to her usual ensemble: a pair of thick silver cables hooked up to the lower ports on her pak, trailing down to the floor and snaking into the shadows.

"I'm not interested in what they said," I heard her snapping at the transmission window as I activated a hoverdisc of my own, rising quickly to her level. "You need to listen to what _I'm_ sa—"

"Sorry," I interrupted, reaching out to tap the icon that would cut the call. "She's going to have to call you back."

The window disappeared and Tak finally noticed me, turning to blink at me indignantly. She didn't look much different than she had when I left – her eyes were clear, her dress was clean, and she was only as pale as the glow of the screen – but nervous energy swirled all around her, palpable as the static that makes your hair stick to a balloon. "What did you do that for?" she demanded. "How did you get in?"

"Let's talk about that some other time." I jerked my head towards the cluttered screen. "What's this?"

"What does it look like? I'm _working_. You're interrupting me." She turned back to the screen and brought up a document, adding notes to the text with a touchscreen keyboard. "Go away."

"Rel says no one's seen you for a week. Is this what you've been doing all that time?"

"Yes," she answered, in a tone that implied an _of course. _

"Have you eaten? Have you slept?"

"Don't be stupid. I don't need to."

"Not every day, maybe. But how long has it been now? Two weeks? Three?"

She rolled her eyes. "I don't need you to look after me, child. I'm _fine_." She managed to peel her gaze from her work long enough to nod at the silver cables, then turned back around to reglue herself to the screen. "I have all the fuel I need."

I stood and watched her for a moment, her fingers darting over the keyboard on the screen; I could read Irken now, but she was typing so fast the letters melted into a blur. Every few lines, I'd notice a twitch in one of her fingers as she jumped from one side of the keyboard to the other, or a near-imperceptible quiver of her wrist. "Tak, you can't do this to yourself. Your body might not need to rest, but your mind does."

"Tell that to the million things I have to do before day's end," she snapped. "I haven't got time to rest."

"You have to make time."

Her fingers paused halfway across the keyboard, hovering over the screen. Then they curled into her hand, into a fist; her brow dropped and her eyes narrowed. "Well, _excuse_ me," she said, the pitch of her voice climbing with every word, becoming furious, hysterical, "for not wanting to _fail_ the twenty billion people who are depending on me!

"I'm sorry I'm not a soda-sucking _moron_, and I actually _care_ whether I lead my people into ruin! You may be too dense to understand this, child, but I don't have _time_ to _make time_ to sit around and do nothing. I'm too busy trying not to _crack_ _under the weight of the Empire's expectations!_"

I knew by the way she spat that last part, shaking, that she hadn't come up with it herself. More than that—I could see the ghost of Nine in her eyes. "Listen, Tak—"

"You don't get it, do you?" she cut me off, in a voice strung taut and trembling. "Nine was right. I can't—_do_ this, I can't handle this alone. I'm running myself into the ground and I'm going to take the whole Empire with me, because I was too _stupid _to listen when she said I needed her."

Her chest heaved in a dry sob. "Why did I think I could do this? How could I have been so _arrogant_, so shortsighted, so sure we could be anything _but_ a nation of _children_—we're _nothing_ without the network, and _I_—I can't—I can't—"

Well. That was one time I wasn't happy to hear her say it. "Sticky," I sighed, shaking my head, "you need to relax."

Without further ado, I peeled the lid off my soda cup, and dumped what was left in it all over the lower ports on her pak. The cables crackled with electricity, then went limp, dropping suddenly from the ports; before Tak could so much as widen her eyes, she was KO'd. Down for the count. She'd have had a nasty encounter with the floor, if I hadn't caught her toppling off the hoverdisc.

She was taller than me by a good s inches now, but she was also about as thin as a lamppost, so I had no trouble slinging her over my shoulder and carrying her out the doors. "Wrap up whatever she was doing in there, would you?" I said to Rel. "We're going to bed. No calls."

I hauled Tak to our room (sweet cyborg Christ, seventeen and I already had an "our room"; it'd have been staggering even if it weren't in space), deposited her on the bed, and flopped down next to her. When I waved my hand over a panel beside the bed, the lights flicked off. Spooning up to her back, I wrapped my arms around her waist and slid my chin over her shoulder, nestling my face into the crook of her neck. Soon, the gentle rhythm of her breath lulled me to sleep.


	25. Invincible

RKB, you raise some interesting questions. I'm resisting the temptation to give anything away, but hopefully this story will address at least some of them to your satisfaction. As I said in my AN for Chapter 21 (you know what frustrates me? The fact that FF has no "prologue" option, so including one throws off my chapter numbering), I'm really just getting started here, so the possibilities are endless.

Also, how can Gaz kiss Tak on the cheek while they're wearing Irken invisi-helmets? Well, how can Zim eat a sandwich while he's wearing one in Battle of the Planets? That's the great thing about writing for this fandom: you can handwave all kinds of little logical inconsistencies with IT'S FUCKING ZIM.

**24. Invincible**

_Tak speaking_

I came to confused, unsure of when it was and where I was and what I was doing there. I realized that I had somehow ended up horizontal, surrounded by something soft—_my bed? My room?_ But that didn't make sense.

My eyes blinked open and I knew it was my room—from where I lay, all I could see was the ceiling, but I recognized it well enough—but I wasn't supposed to _be_ here. Last I remembered, I'd been in one of the hollow interface rooms, logging my notes on the projected conquests report Commander Shlorb had—

_The child. _Suddenly, it all rushed back to me—or, more descriptive of the sensation, slapped me across the face. As though propelled by a catapult, I shot up in bed. _That rotten, presumptuous child!_

Sure enough, she was lounging on a sofa in the sitting-area across the room, her feet and a box of doughnuts resting on the low table in front of it. "Morning, Sticky," she said through a mouthful of the doughnut in her hand. "Want a doughnut?"

"YOU LOATHSOME LITTLE BEAST!" I got to my feet and stalked over to where she sat, hands fisted, seething. "Do you have any _idea_ what you could've done?! Of all the stupid things—you're lucky I'm still _alive_! You could have damaged my pak, I could have fallen from the hoverdisc—not to mention you've cost me an entire _night's_ work, so now I'll have to—"

"Tak. Please." She gave me this look that somehow sent all of my anger tumbling back down my throat. I think it had something to do with the sincerity of it – when so much she said and did was casual and cavalier, one solemn glance could shake my surest stance. "Sit down."

So I sat on the sofa beside her, and she picked up a cup from the table and handed it to me. It was warm, giving off steam from a little hole punched in the lid, and from the smell I knew it was _feeya _– a creamy, sweet drink that was always on tap next to the soda, vaguely similar to what humans called hot chocolate. I'd used to drink it all the time at the Academy, while I was studying for some exam or other, but I couldn't remember when I'd last had it since.

I could feel Gaz's eyes on me as I brought the cup to my mouth, taking a long sip and then nursing the rim. For a moment, the taste took me back to the Academy, so many years ago – when everything seemed so simple, and my fingers didn't overlap when I held the cup in both hands.

"You can't live like this," she finally said. "Locking yourself up for days on end. Sucking reserve fuel when your pak gives out. I'm not going to stand by and watch you burn yourself out."

"You don't have a choice," I mumbled into the lip of the cup, without looking up at her. "And neither do I."

She sighed and the sofa cushions shifted as she scooted over to me, snuggling up to my side. Still staring across the cup's lid, I felt her slide an arm around my shoulders, squeeze me close, and kiss the sliver of skin that showed between my glove and my sleeve.

"I've told you this before," she said, laying her head on my shoulder, "and I'm going to keep on telling you til it sticks: everything Nine said to you was a steaming pile of crap. She wasn't revealing some deep truth; she was trying everything she could think of to make you feel worthless, so you'd think you needed her. You're not going to fail the Empire. You're not going to lead anybody into ruin."

"I know you believe that. I tried to believe it, too." I closed my eyes. "Do you understand how comprehensive the network was? The control brains were responsible for everything, _everything_, and when I took stock of the situation I realized I'd never be able to do what they did. Our society is going to fall apart because of me. Our military, our education system, our reproduction labs—they're all descending into chaos, because I couldn't suck it up and suffer for my people."

"Well, why do you have to do it all yourself? Everybody delegates, Sticky; there's never been a king or a chief or a president man who's been able to _be_ the entire government. Maybe _you_ can't do everything the network did, but you can appoint other people to help you."

"As if I didn't think of that!"

Insulted by the implication, I shoved Gaz off the couch and stood up, plunking my cup down on the table. As she scrambled to her feet, I began to pace the sitting area, fuming. Did she understand how close to madness I'd driven myself over the past month, trying to figure out what to _do_? Did she think that after thirty days and thirty nights spent obsessing relentlessly, there'd have been anything that just hadn't _occurred_ to me?

"How can I possibly feel secure _delegating_," I raged, "when I've just realized how two-faced my entire society is? My whole life, I've been so blind, so _stupid_—I believed that the Tallest were Almighty and the network _served_ the Empire, and look where that got me!

"Everything we tell ourselves is a pack of lies, and I can't tell the truth from the fiction any better than anybody else. If I couldn't trust the Almighty Tallest to be what their title said they were, how can I possibly trust Commander Whoever to take over the education system?"

She was standing looking at me as if I were hopeless, slowly shaking her head. I shot her a glare. "What? You think it's better to be known for having _appointed_ the people who lead the Empire into ruin, than to be known for having done it singlehandedly?"

"I _think_ you're more paranoid than my brother, and that's saying something." She held up her hands, displaying palms like creased white flags warding off another outburst. "Look, I get it. You're a control freak. You want to micromanage everything because you're not sure anyone else can do it. But you don't have the luxury of micromanagement anymore.

"If the Irken people want to move past being _a nation of children_, they've got to start somewhere. You _have_ to trust your twenty billion sixteen-year-olds to take the car keys and be home by curfew, because if you don't, they'll be living in your basement for the rest of their lives. Is that what you want, Tak? An Empire of basement-dwellers?"

I stared at her. "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

She pressed her lips together. "DELEGATE, Sticky! It's not a choice! You can have councils or cabinets or fucking feudal lords—you can grab a stick and a handful of these little green assmunchers and knight them if you want to—but you are _not_ going to live your life like you've been living this past month, because _I'm_ not going to fuck you in the hollow interface room!"

_She always seemed so confident,_ I remembered thinking before we left Nraya. _So_ _certain everything would turn out right. Surely it was because she was a child, and blind. _

"You make it sound so easy."

I hated the way the words deflated my voice. I hated how _weak_ I felt, how pathetic—I hated how hard it was to believe Gaz when she said Nine was wrong. I hated that I wasn't young enough to be as surefooted as she was, or dumb enough to be as gratingly confident as Zim. I hated _doubting_ myself, but I'd have been stupid not to, wouldn't I? It couldn't possibly be as simple as she made it sound.

Gaz looked at me a moment, almost smiling and yet not smiling at all. "Come on," she said, turning towards the bedroom doors. "There's something you should see."

Wondering why she always felt the need to punctuate my personal crises (not the good kind) with something she had to show me, I sighed and followed her into the corridor, where Rel sat pretending she hadn't been eavesdropping and Mimi, as ever straightforward, took no such pains.

We breezed past them and down the hall onto the main deck, where Gaz herded me onto a hoverdisc. To my surprise, we didn't dock at the next floor up, or the next; she took us up and up through every layer of the Massive, until the hoverdisc let out a _ping_ to announce the end of its line.

"Where are you taking me, child?" I asked somewhat crossly, surveying the room with narrowed eyes. We must have been just under the hull of the ship by then. It occurred to me that we were standing in an airlock chamber – a small, spherical room stocked with space gear, a circular hatch staring down at us from the center of the ceiling. "Why would I want to _see _anything up here?"

Gaz ignored me, shoving her feet into a pair of boots and her head into a helmet. As its cloaker flickered on, she vaulted up onto the ladder that hung from the hatch, and clambered up to the ceiling. Before I could step into my boots, she had opened the airlock and slipped out of sight, into the inky disc of space where the hatch had been.

I climbed out of the airlock a moment later to find her standing on the hull, a few feet shy of its slope. Looking awfully satisfied, I noted, for someone who had just dragged me all the way up here for no discernable reason.

"What on Irk are you trying to prove, child?" I snapped, finally fed up. "Did you just bring me up here to—"

"Look down."

I did. Between my feet, at first, and then further along the hull—down that slope like a cliff over a black sea, to the great red face of the ship. To the part of the hull where the Irken insignia, looming larger than most of the vessels that would face it, proclaimed the glory of the Empire more eloquently than any speech.

But it wasn't the same insignia I'd seen two months ago, approaching the Armada ignorant and terrified. It was _my_ insignia, the one with the curled antennae, the one on the wings of my ship—the one I'd doodled in the margins of my assignments at the Academy, pondering the injustice of an emblem unrepresentative of an entire sector of our population. As much a part of me as my name. As good as coming home.

It took me a minute to push my thoughts into articulate molds. "You—you did this?" I asked the child without looking at her, unable to lift my eyes from the hull.

"Well, I didn't _do_ it. I had a couple of crew guys do it for me. This morning, before you woke up." I could hear the smile in her voice. "But yeah, it was my idea."

"Why?"

"Because I like defacing other people's property." She slung an arm around my shoulders, leaned in, and planted a kiss on my cheek. "And because you're gonna be the best Tallest ever."

We didn't go back in right away. For awhile, we sat together on the hull of the Massive, drifting through space. Through an endless canal of planets, hanging huge and bright like paper lanterns in the light of their sun, and far-off forests of stars—a vacuum that felt a little bit fuller, for the weight of her arm on my shoulders, and the warmth of her side pressed against mine.

I knew it was only her humanity and her youth speaking, when she made these bold, senseless generalizations. I knew that her saying it didn't make it true. Still, it made me feel like I'd felt on the platform, Presenting myself to a roaring crowd: invincible, if only for a moment. Like if so many people – or just one important person – thought I knew what I was doing, there had to be a little truth in it, somewhere.


	26. Clean Cuts

This is pretty much irrelevant to the following chapter, but you know what irks (ha!) me? The fact that a large majority of this fandom (at least that represented on TVtropes and the Zim wikia) seems incapable of taking Word of God with a heaping helping of salt.

Jhonen Vasquez making a joke in an interview or the DVD commentary DOES NOT qualify the contents of that joke as instant, incontrovertible canon. A good 75% of what actually occurs in the show proper isn't meant to be taken seriously; why on Irk would anyone assume that things the production staff have said offhand are SRS BUSINESS?

Also, hooray for timeskips! Who doesn't love a good timeskip?

**25. Clean Cuts**

_Ten years later_

"What was your decision, then?"

Minister Splink's wavering green eyes blinked out at me from the transmission screen, darting to my left and my right before returning hesitantly to me. "I…didn't make one."

"What do you mean, _you didn't make one_?" I slammed my hands down on either side of the console, glaring at him. "You're the Minister of Territory Distribution, your job is to _distribute territory_! What part of that don't you understand?"

"No part, my Tallest. I mean—I'm sorry." He hung his head and sighed. "As I'm sure you already know, the Lith nebula boasts a number of very desirable qualities, and is thus in very high demand. I met with the leaders of the Councils, and they all made an extremely convincing case for why _their _department should be allotted the space. What was I to do?"

"Well, you could've started by showing some backbone. But I suppose that's a moot point now."

We'd occupied the Lith nebula because it was ripe for colonization: its location was strategically valuable and its planets were largely uninhabited, with uncommonly accommodating topography. I had thought we'd been lucky, securing our grip on the territory before we had to challenge someone else for the right, but now it seemed we'd bitten off more than we – or rather, Minister Splink – could chew.

"Okay, moving on. Who _exactly_ did you speak with? What was it they said?"

He straightened up, better-versed in delivering reports than accounting for failures. "I spoke first with the head of the Justice Council. They're lobbying for control of the new territory on the grounds that the prison colonies are overcrowded, and they want to expand their facilities."

"Do they really need an entire nebula to do that?"

"According to Councillor Prai, they do."

"Well, maybe if Councillor Prai weren't trying to toss everyone who was mean to her at the Academy into a prison colony, she wouldn't have to worry so much about overcrowding." I rolled my eyes, making a mental note to move her upcoming performance review to the top of my list. "Who else?"

"The Reproductive Sciences Council believes that the environments on several of the planets in the nebula would be especially hospitable for developing smeets. The Military Council thinks it would be best used as a base of operations for when we launch our conquest of the Plogg system later this year.

"The Education Council, like the Justice Council, wants to use it to expand their facilities – but no sooner did Councillor Mal leave my quarters than Councillor Skree barged back in, _demanding_ that the Education Council _not_ be awarded the territory, on the grounds that military training should fall under the Military Council's jurisdiction."

"What? That's ridiculous. Military training has been incorporated into general education for as long as anyone can remember. He's just trying to bully you into preferencing his department."

Minister Splink's shoulders slumped, his gaze gravitating towards the floor on his side of the transmission. "Then I spoke with the head of the Recreation Council. And _she_ said that if I gave _her_ the territory, she would tell the people at Shloogorgh's to bump me to the front of the line whenever I come in." He looked at me mournfully. "Have you _seen_ the lines at Shloogorgh's, my Tallest?"

"Have I _seen_ the lines at—" I was suddenly overcome with the powerful urge to chuck something heavy at the screen, preferably hard enough that he'd feel it on the other side. "Minister Splink," I growled, "are you at all _aware_ that you're supposed to be making a _serious decision_ here?!"

"Of course I am! But it's _hard_!"

"You know what's going to be hard? Getting the smell out of your clothes when I send you off to shovel snoorbeast dung on planet Stink for the next fifty years!"

He shrank back from the screen, wincing. "Well, I—this is why I was hoping to turn this matter over to you, my Tallest. When I informed the Councils that no decision had been reached, they said they should be allowed to plead their cases in front of you, and perhaps you would be—more decisive."

"Fine. I'll do it, if only to keep _you_ from giving the nebula to whoever offers you the best bribe. You can tell the Councils I'll be in touch." I drummed my fingers against the console, casting him a less-than-pleasant glance. "Was there anything else?"

"No, my Tallest. Thank you, my Tallest. I—"

Feeling no need to be groveled at for another quarter-hour, I cut the transmission, plunging the room into refreshing silence. For a moment, I stood with my hands on the console, blinking down at my reflection in the darkened control panel—then, I lifted my head, and screamed, "REL!"

I'd never once needed to page Rel. She always came scurrying the second I called her name, because she was never far from where I was. She'd sort of glommed onto me after I promoted her, and at first I'd been slightly horrified (_go_ _irritate the child, why don't you? She's the one who forced my hand_),but she'd proven useful enough over the years. Now, she was effectively my personal assistant, though still encoded as general crew.

The doors to the videoconference room slid open and Rel dashed inside, clutching a tablet to her chest. "Yes, my Tallest?"

"I'm taking over the allotment of the Lith nebula. Add a meeting with the council heads to my schedule."

I heard the tablet _blip _as she did as I said. "Anything else?"

"Mark off videoconferencing with Minister Splink. What's next after that?"

"Uhmm…reviewing preliminary reports on the Plogg system. Shall I bring them up in a hollow interface room?"

"Nah. She can take a break." Gaz sauntered in through the open doors, Mimi beside her. She snaked her arm around my waist and kissed me for as long as I'd let her kiss me outside our bedroom (which wasn't long), then reared back and cocked her head at me. "What's up?"

I groaned. "I hate everyone."

"Why?"

"People are stupid. What else is new?" I waved a hand to dismiss Rel. She slunk obediently back into the hall, the doors clicking shut behind her. "How've you been?"

Gaz let me go and began to wander around the room, running her fingertips along any surface she encountered along the way. Mimi, never one for restlessness, climbed up onto the console, that being perhaps the best seat from which to observe the conversation. "Bored."

"Convene the fleet, then. Start planning your next operation."

"There's no more operations no plan. We haven't heard so much as a whisper from the resistance in two months." She glanced over her shoulder at me. "You know that."

I did, and I was still having a hard time believing it. I had been mocking her, when I asked if she'd thought her toy made her a good strategist; I hadn't actually expected her to be the best fleet commander in the military. "Well, maybe if you weren't such a good commander, you'd have more to occupy your time."

"I know, right? I'm half-considering mounting a resistance to myself, just so I can crush me." She strolled over to the console and turned to lean against it beside Mimi, resting the heels of her hands on its edge. Then, as casually as if she were proposing a round of sodas, said, "Let's have a baby."

At first, I thought it was the setup for some stupid joke. "What?"

"Or a smeet, or whatever you call them." She shrugged. "I want a little nugget to play with."

I blinked at her, slowly registering the nauseating possibility that she might actually be serious. "Are you out of your mind, child? Where on Irk is this _coming_ from?"

"I don't know. How old am I now—twenty-seven, twenty-eight?" With her pak supplying her with the bio-booster I'd prepared, it had taken her a remarkably short time to begin thinking of age the way Irkens did: as a marginally interesting tidbit of personal trivia, rather than the all-important axis around which one's life spun. Like ours, her physical age was ambiguous and her mental age was immaterial (though she'd always be _the child_ to me).

"I figure everybody back on Earth must be popping out spawn right about now," she added. "My biological clock is ticking."

"Is that anything like a lifeclock?"

"Don't be stupid. I would think that you, of all people, would understand this, if only from a _scientific_ point of view—weren't you the one spouting all that crap about _propagating the species _in my bedroom that day?"

"Child, that was more than ten years ago. I haven't the faintest idea what I said." I crossed my arms across my chest, frowning. "But rest assured that if you're suffering from reproductive urges, I shall make it a priority to find a cure."

"I don't want a cure," she said matter-of-factly. "I want a baby."

I glanced at Mimi, who was either reserving judgment on the issue or felt nothing she cared to share with me. Her eyes were impassive, focused on neither of us in particular. I wondered if she'd known about this nonsense before I had. "And how exactly do you envision that happening?" I asked, deciding to humor the child a moment. "Just because you can mate with me doesn't mean I can impregnate you, you know. I'm not one of those aliens from your horror films. I'm not going to lay eggs in your stomach."

"Fuck. And that sounded so appealing, too." She rolled her eyes and pushed herself up on the console, scooting back to sit with her feet swinging above the floor. "I don't want to get pregnant, anyway. Why don't you just build us a baby? You built Mimi, you built your ship, you built my pak—you can build us a baby."

"So what you mean to say is, you want me to go down in history as the person who unleashed the abomination of a human-Irken hybrid on the unsuspecting universe."

"Sure. It'd be cute, right?" She flashed me a grin. "She could have your eyes, and my internal organs."

"Oh, you've already chosen a gender. Lovely."

"Yeah, well, I always figured that if I ever had kids, they'd have to be girls. Otherwise they might turn out like Dib."

I shook my head slowly, drifting to the other side of the room to find something – _anything _– to distract me. The child was delusional. I couldn't reason with her any more than I could slap some sense into Minister Splink. "We're not discussing this. I'm not even _considering_ this. Go dunk your head in the chemical shower, and we'll talk when your mind is clear."

Horrid videoconference room. With Gaz monopolizing the console, I couldn't even _pretend_ to be busy. "Shouldn't you be _suffering _from the same urges as me?" she plowed on, failing to understand the_ not_ before _discussing this._ "I mean, if I broke the seal on your horny-juice, shouldn't there be some mommy-juice in there, too? You know, passing on your genetic material? I thought it was pretty much a package deal."

"By that logic, you want me to go find a male Irken to sire my offspring." I shuddered at the thought. "You're making me physically ill, child. What do I have to do to get you to leave me be?"

"Say yes."

Sighing, I pressed my lips together and my hands to my temples, in a futile attempt to contain the frustration brewing under my skin. "Child," I said, as evenly as I could under the circumstances, "I will give you…_anything _you ask for. I'll give you a planet, I'll give you a _galaxy,_ I'll give you an entire race to wait on you hand and foot—but I will _not, _not now nor _ever_, reproduce with you. Is that clear, or must I say it again?"

For the first time since she'd come in, a frown creased her brow. "What _exactly_ is your problem, Tak?" she said, her sudden seriousness implied not only by her tone, but by her having used my name, unembellished by any form of her nickname for me_._ "Why are you being such a jerk about this?"

"You mean why am I refusing to saddle us both with the lifelong burden of parenthood? Why do I refuse to waste my time and resources engineering a prototype for a completely unique species, just so that you can dangle a rattle in front of its face?"

"What I _mean_ is," she said, almost snarling, "why don't you give a fuck about whether or not _I'm_ happy?"

"Child, if it would make you _happy_, then by all means, tour the colonized galaxies and pick out an alien larva to raise. Go to a gestation lab and adopt a smeet. Swab your cheek and clone yourself, I don't care. If you're really that _desperate _to hold something warm and drooling, you're more than welcome to find one—_but don't drag me into it!_"

I glared at her, tightening my hands into fists, foregoing any effort to keep from raising my voice. "How hard can this possibly be for you to understand? I don't _want_ my genes in some half-breed freak of nature, toddling around the Massive calling me _Mummy_! I don't need yet another person expecting me to look after them, and I don't want to sacrifice my life to your biological compulsions!

'I don't know the first thing about children or parenting, because I've never wanted to, because I've never needed to, because _my_ culture doesn't _expect _me to. The Irken language doesn't even have _words_ like 'mother' and 'father.' You can't just demand that I assume this role that's entirely foreign to me. It would be like me asking you to—to—"

"To _what_?" she cut in, sneering, before I could finish the thought. "What would it be like asking me to do? Command an Irken fleet? Fight for an Irken cause? Leave my home planet and everything I've ever known, forever, to come here and eat your food and speak your language and live on your ships? You're full of shit, Tak. I've played a _foreign role_ for ten years for you, and you can't do this one thing for me?"

I was burning to counter her point almost before she made it. "I didn't_ ask_ you to do any of those things! _You_ said _I'm coming with you, you _said _you've got to give me something to do_—you practically _auditioned_ for this role! I never did or said a single thing to make you think you _had_ to do any of this. There's never been anything to stop you from taking your ship and going back to _your home planet and everything you've ever known_, whatever that amounts to."

"You know what stops me? _You_ stop me. I'm here because of you, because I l—" She stopped short, swallowed whatever she'd been about to stay. Face twisted in a scowl, she dropped with a _thunk_ to the floor, the _clack_ of her boots sharper than usual as she headed for the doors. "Whatever. You've obviously made up your mind."

For a second, my voice stuck in my throat. "You can't walk out on me," I snapped at her shadow in the doorway.

"Fuck you, Tak."

I startled when the doors shut, though I'd watched them closing. Suddenly, I was exhausted. Harsh words with the child always left me feeling drained, especially when (as was often the case) they were vicious; when we fought, it was brief but bitter, like a clean cut. Painful, but quick to heal.

Not that knowing the seas would soon settle made them any less choppy. Standing there blinking at the seam between the doors, I was reeling, fuming, shocked, infuriated—still trying to process what had just happened, while nursing the throbbing knot of injustice in my gut.

"You don't think I'm being unreasonable, do you?" I said, looking at Mimi.

She shook her head – not as if to say _no_, but as if she were wiser than both of us, the look in her eyes implying a sigh. _I think that that's a question you'll have to answer for yourself._

I didn't see the child for the rest of the day – ostensibly because I was avoiding her, really because she'd made herself too scarce to be avoided. Of course, there was plenty of space on the Massive in which to play these petty games, so it was easy for each of us to ice the other out. I went about the schedule Rel kept for me, pushing Gaz and her baby nonsense as far from my mind as I could, and it wasn't long before night (such as it was) rolled around.

One might say I stuck to a humanoid sleep schedule because it was a hard habit to break. Because I'd arranged my time that way for seven years - six to conserve my fuel stranded on Earth, one because Gaz would drag me under the dome of my projector before I could slip away – and had become accustomed to it.

One might say that (and one _did_ say that, if one did not wish to offend her Tallest), but one would be wrong. For which one could be forgiven, because one wouldn't necessarily know that the special appeal of the time we called "night" was that it was so often christened by her hands sliding under my nightdress.

Thus, aware that to do otherwise would be to grind salt into the wound – that it would break our unspoken rule of slights forgotten by nightfall, clean cuts knit without scars – I went to bed. Dimming the lights in our room, I lay beneath the blanket with my back to the door, one eyelid cracked, watching the wall.

And eventually, light broke over the paneling, for the moment between when the doors opened and shut. I heard her footsteps padding across the room, and the soft rustle of fabric as she undressed and slipped into that awful, ratty T-shirt she slept in – the one relic of her life on Earth she still clung to, even eleven years out. She said it didn't bother her, because it was big enough to wear over her pak. I had grown used to the smell.

I felt the bed shift as she scooted up behind me, fitting the front of her body into the back of mine, and looped her arms around my waist (she called it _spooning_; if that was so, I wondered what forking would be). She pressed her nose to the nape of my neck and breathed in. Neither of us apologized. Neither of us so much as spoke.

We lay there in silence awhile, reconciling as best we knew how. Then, her hands wandered from my waist down my thighs, and hiked up my nightdress, and slid under it, and her lips crooked in a smile against my neck, and I let her in.


	27. The Thing in the Tank

**26. The Thing in the Tank**

_Gaz speaking_

So the baby topic was dropped, and that was okay. I figured Tak was probably right: it was a stupid idea, and it wasn't worth arguing over, at any rate. We had centuries of tomorrows ahead of us; if I decided it was a matter worth revisiting, I'd choose one and bug her about it then.

I assumed that was the end of it. We made up that night and never said another word about it, and it wasn't long before I forgot the whole thing. The resistance cropped up again, so I had plenty to do, and Tak and I were fine. At first, I didn't even notice when she would slip off.

Then, when it occurred to me that we were spending less time together – that I managed to catch her less and less around the Massive (she always seemed to have just left wherever Rel said she'd be), and she was rarely there in the morning when I woke up (sometimes I suspected she'd never come to bed) – I attributed it to the demands of her duties. I figured some crazy shit was going down (or else her OCD was flaring up) and it was keeping her busy, and I didn't let it bother me.

It helped that when she _was_ around, she didn't act like something was up. Every so often, when we'd fall into a comfortable silence, I'd look over and catch her preoccupied, her eyes dark and distant. But then she'd blink, and her mind would return from wherever it had gone, and she'd glance at me indignantly, as if to say _what are _you _looking at? _And we'd get back to talking or eating or fucking or whatever it was we'd been doing, and I didn't let it bother me.

Four months went by, and on the next-to-last day of the fourth month, I left a meeting with my fleet's lieutenants to find her waiting in the hall. "Hey, Sticky," I said, surprised, as my equally-surprised lieutenants parted like the Red (green?) Sea for her. "What's up?"

"I have something for you. Come with me."

The way she said it, that _something _could've been anything from a brand-new Ferrari to a summons for jury duty; her voice and her face offered no clues. So I followed her, out of curiosity, down a series of corridors, which led to one of the labs off the main deck.

She swiped her palm over the reader and we stepped inside, finding the room empty. For once, there were no coat-clad lab monkeys to trip over as they skittered between workstations, holding overflowing beakers at arms' length. The lightstripes flickered on one by one.

The lab was different when it was quiet. I could hear our footsteps – the _clack_ of our boots at slightly different intervals, her strides a half-second longer than mine, and the soft hiss of her gown's tails trailing behind her on the floor – echo as she led us to a paneled recess in one wall. Beneath it, there was a long, narrow console, a control panel lit up at one end. Without preface, Tak pressed an icon on the screen, and the panels in the wall slid apart.

Behind them lay a glass tank filled with lavender liquid, huge, shiny bubbles forming at its floor and drifting upwards. It was backlit so that it seemed to glow, throwing rippling pink light across both of our faces. In the center of the tank, I saw suspended a tiny, curled-up—_thing._

It was green, though the liquid diluted the shade. Green (green-pink, green-purple) all over, because it was naked, a tiny naked thing in a curled-up ball, light ribboning its soft curled-up limbs. They looked soft, anyway. It had four fingers on each tiny hand and four toes on each tiny foot and they all looked soft, like its fingers would mold to yours if you slid one into its palm.

It had a closed mouth and closed eyes with black-veins-between-stained-glass eyelashes, and a dusting of down the color of a plum, red-purple, on its head. It had a tiny soft nose and tiny soft ears. It didn't move, as we stood there watching it, but I could sense the life inside it through the glass – the eager flutter of rhythms waiting to begin.

"So?" Tak said, after what must have been a millennium of silence.

"So…" I saw her face only through its reflection in the glass, tense with anticipation. Her face and the almost-living thing and then my face, a deep crease in its brow. "This is why you've been so busy?"

She nodded – a clipped, hungry nod. "Do you like it?"

"I…" I swallowed hard. "I wish you'd have told me."

"I wanted it to be a surprise."

"Well—this isn't the kind of thing that should be a surprise, is it?"

I was startled to feel frustration welling up in me, the longer I looked at the thing in the tank and her face mirrored beside it. No—not frustration. Anger. A dark, slow-burning anger, like an ember wedged hot under my ribs, sending licks of flame snapping up into my throat.

"This isn't want I wanted, Tak."

"This isn't what you _wanted_?" she said, first disbelieving, then as angry as I was. I made myself turn to look at her, watch her tension shatter into fury. "You beg and bully me into doing this, and it's not what you _wanted_? I waste four months' work, and it's not what you _wanted_? What more could I possibly do for you, child? You said this would make you _happy_!"

"It would have, if you'd have _told_ me! You didn't think I'd have wanted to have some input? You didn't think I'd have wanted to be _prepared_?"

"You certainly _seemed_ prepared when you proposed it so _belligerently_!"

"You said it was never going to happen! I thought we'd let it go!" I threw a hand out, palm-up, gesturing to the thing in the tank. "When you want to _surprise_ somebody, you give them chocolate, or flowers, or even a puppy, for fuck's sake—you don't give them a kid! I said '_let's_ have a baby', _together_, not 'you go off and make one and don't tell me for four goddamn months'!"

She was glowering at me like I had wounded her—like she'd offered me her heart (or her squeedlyspooch, or whatever) and I'd crushed it under my heel, shaken the juice from my boot and sauntered off. At the time, I was too upset to give a fuck. "Well, I'm _sorry _that nothing I do is ever good enough for you!" she snapped.

"Oh, come off it. What are you, thirteen?" I sneered at her. "You know what? You _should_ be sorry. Sorry that you're this much of a control freak, that you couldn't even ask my _opinion_ on this—sorry that you're so selfish, and insensitive, and that ten years of everybody sucking up to you all the time has made you so fucking _entitled_! Listen, this may come as a shock to you, but I'm _not _one of your legions of ass-kissers, and I _don't_ have to love everything you do just because _you_ did it!"

She bit down on her lower lip, as if to keep herself from lashing out and biting me instead. "Get out," she growled from between grit teeth.

"Gladly."

I stalked out of the room as quickly as my feet would take me, only regretting that I couldn't slam the doors. I couldn't intimidate the crew quite like Tak could, but I'd cultivated my share of respect among their ranks; those I didn't plow through on my way down the hall skittered aside before I passed. Smacking the reader by the door so hard I could've cracked it, I crumpled against the wall in the privacy of our room, almost trembling with the pressure building under my skin.

How did Tak always manage to be so _infuriating_? How could she not understand what she had done? I mean, I got that Irkens didn't grasp the whole "parenthood" thing like humans did, but shouldn't it have been obvious that dumping the lifelong commitment of a living creature into my lap without warning _wasn't a good idea_? Wasn't she smart enough to know that if this was going to happen, I'd have wanted to be a part of it all the way?

_She made us a baby. _I buried my head in my hands. _She made us a frickin' baby and I had nothing to do with it, save for whatever DNA she snatched while I wasn't looking. What now?_

Well. I could choose to drag this out and make it painful, ignoring her and the thing in the tank until—what? Until the resentment between us festered like a sore? Until she realized she was wrong and apologized? The second I could cross off my list before I wrote it down, and the first wouldn't get either of us anywhere.

I could return to the lab and tell her to get rid of the thing, just flush out the tank and let us get on with our lives. I could tell her to junk this one and help her make another one, so we'd be in it together from the start.

It would be like having an abortion, right? I'd never been a pro-lifer. Better to nip the kid in the bud than bring it into a world where it's not wanted.

I sat there against the wall, my legs pulled to my chest, my elbows resting on my knees, and considered it. The green-pink, green-purple thing. The tiny naked thing in a curled-up ball, with my hair and my nose. I closed my eyes and pictured it floating there in the middle of the tank, perfectly still but for the gentle bob of its limbs in the liquid, the flutter of a wisp of hair. Perfectly perfect. Untouched by anything.

I didn't go back to the lab right away. Even once I'd decided what to do, I waited until night fell, taking what remained of the day to cool off in our room. To remind myself that as dense as she'd been, her heart (or her squeedlyspooch, or whatever it was still crusting on the sole of my boot) was in the right place. That yeah, what she did was stupid, but she did it for me.

When the doors slid open, I saw Tak slouched in a dish chair in front of the tank, staring morosely at the thing suspended in the liquid. Lavender light washed over her face, catching the silver threads in her gown. She didn't glance up at me, but as I approached her, I knew she knew I was there.

She was turning a little remote over and over in one hand, fingering its buttons. "I could just scrap it, you know," she muttered.

I sighed. "Don't do that."

She waved her hand through the air beside her and another chair materialized, sprouting up from beneath a panel in the floor. Ignoring it, I shoved her aside and skooched into her chair with her, nearly in her lap, my legs crisscrossing hers. For a little while we were quiet, looking at the tank and the thing that was ours inside it.

I contemplated its skin, near-translucent with newness, like a little statue carved from jade. Its blade-sharp black eyelashes, fringing lids that could only hide a particular shade of purple. "It favors you," I said.

"Its appearance is deceptive. Its most noticeable features are Irken, but it's largely human under its skin."

"What do you call it?"

She didn't hesitate. "Vix."

I didn't know if it meant something to her or if it was just a nonsense-word, like most Irken names were, but Tak seemed certain and I didn't mind it. It was a good name for Scrabble, anyway. Same points as mine, I thought, which had to be a good omen.

Pushing myself up out of the hollow of the chair, I straddled Tak's waist and slid into her lap, grinning. "Well all right, then. You know what you have to do to make a baby, right?"

She snorted. "I think it's a little late for that."

"Never too late, Sticky. We've got to have something to say when she asks where babies come from." I leaned in and pressed my lips to the base of her right antenna, purring, "When a human and an Irken love each other veeery much…"

"Don't think I won't push you off of me."

Chuckling, I fished through the folds of her gown until I found the little remote, and hit the button to close the panels over the tank. As they slid shut, the lavender light slowly slivering into nothingness, Tak regarded me with a bemused half-smile. "She wouldn't have been able to see us, you know."

"I figured." I draped my arms over my shoulders and kissed her. "But we're _parents _now, Sticky. We have to start thinking about these things."


	28. The Anomaly of Vix

**27. The Anomaly of Vix**

Thus began the first chapter of My Life With the Queen of the Universe and Our Half-Breed Freak Baby. Was it any wonder I had given up being surprised by whatever happened to me?

Mercifully, the literal _baby_ part didn't last too excruciatingly long. Thanks to a neat trick of Vix's hybrid biology, she lingered in what Tak so sweetly termed her "larval stage" just long enough to be cute and cuddly and grab our fingers and burble baby-talk, but not long enough to drive us insane screaming and spitting up and yanking my hair and Tak's antennae every chance she got.

Had she been all Irken, she'd have opened her eyes walking and talking and ready to be shipped off for military indoctrination; had she been all human, she'd have spent the first few months of her life half-blind and useless, unable to do much of anything but shriek and drool. Because she was neither, she occupied a happy medium.

When she was teeny tiny, Tak saw her as mostly a nuisance – like a puppy she'd wrapped up as my Christmas gift, only to end up forever tripping over it and cringing when it yapped. When she cried at night, Tak sent Rel or Mimi to quiet her, and rolled over in bed. When I plunked her into Tak's arms, she stared at her with eyes the size of dinner plates, holding her at arms' length like a baby-shaped blob of radioactive goop. She'd meant what she said in the videoconference room: _mother _was a role entirely foreign to her.

Once, when Vix was about two months old – old enough to sit up and smile and babble nonsense at us, but still a month shy of her first steps – I brought her to the bridge while Tak was there, sitting in a lounger talking business with the crew.

"What's up?" I announced us, placing Vix in Tak's lap.

Tak paused midsentence and looked down at the purple-smocked lump in her lap, tilting her head back and blinking up at her. Vix's eyes, brilliant violet, took up what seemed two-thirds of her face, her half-open pink mouth dabbed like an afterthought beneath them. Her hair had grown long enough to cap her head and curl around her ears.

"What is she doing here?" Tak demanded, shrinking back from Vix as if I'd dumped a rattlesnake in her lap. "I'm busy. I can't deal with her right now."

"Yeah, well, neither can I. I've got a planning session with the fleet in five minutes, and I'm not bringing her to that."

"Then give her to Rel, or Mimi, or…somebody," Tak said uncomfortably, as Vix played with the lengths of silk that streamed from the shoulders of her gown. "Anybody."

"I'm giving her to _you_," I said. "You can't avoid her forever, you know. She's got to bond with her mum sometime."

Tak frowned. "Her _what_?"

"Well, she has to have something to call us, right? She's going to start talking soon."

"Yes, but why _that_?"

"Why not? I mean, you're British, right?"

"No, I'm not _British_!" she snapped. "I'm Irken!"

"Po-tay-toes, po-tah-toes. It works. She can call me Mom." Tak was still looking at me with her face scrunched up, like she'd have wrinkled her nose if she'd had one. "Oh, come on. Like you can think of anything better? You said yourself there are no Irken words for it. She's not going to call you _my Tallest_, and I don't figure you for one of those hip parents who has their kid call them by their first name."

Tak sighed and sank back in her lounger. Vix rolled over and half-shimmied, half-crawled her way up Tak's torso, depositing herself on her chest. "I suppose you're right," Tak muttered. Vix reached up to grab the cord of her wavebreaker, and Tak slapped her hand away. "Leave that alone, you beastly little larva."

Vix gurgled indignantly, and I shook my head. "I'll be back in an hour. Try not to slap the baby around while I'm gone." I leaned down to kiss the top of Tak's head, then Vix's cheek, fat and soft and tinted turquoise where a human baby's would be pink. "Be nice to Mummy, Vix. Her life is hard."

"Oh, just shut up and leave already," Tak grumbled. Vix laughed.

Things changed, though, as Vix got older. By the time she was a year old, she was toddling down hallways and climbing onto hoverdiscs and terrorizing the crew by plowing through them on the deck like a 4x4 through traffic, and yammering in mostly-intelligible Irken to anybody who would listen.

It didn't make her any easier to deal with, but it did make her easier for Tak to relate to. Now that she could get around without being carried, now that you could speak to her and get an answer, Tak stopped seeing her as a larva and began seeing her as a person – though she still had trouble seeing her as a kid.

When Vix grew tall enough to amuse herself by playing Simon with the control panels on the bridge (in the process making doughnuts of several nearby moons), I decided it was time she had some toys. So we fiddled with the matter generator until we came up with a dollhouse – actually a little replica of a ship not unlike the Massive, though with fewer laser cannons and more rainbows.

It was a tangible hologram, so that the exterior would disappear when she reached through it, exposing a network of decks and corridors for her to tap her dolls across. And with the matter generator at her disposal, she had a crapload of dolls.

She had dolls that looked like the Irken crew who formed the backdrop of her world, dolls that looked like Tak with her slender silhouette and trailing gown, dolls that looked how she imagined other humans might. Dolls with random combinations of human and Irken features, imaginary members of her race. Dolls that looked like the aliens she saw in the research catalogues we substituted for storybooks, and dolls that looked like creatures that existed only in her head.

We were sitting on the floor of her bedroom one afternoon, the dollhouse (dollship?) suspended in its antigravity bubble, Vix's collection of dolls strewn across the floor. When the doors _whished_, we glanced up to see Tak drag herself into the room, and flop with a groan onto Vix's bed.

"Have I told you lately that I hate you?" she said, most likely to me.

"What for this time?"

"Because if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be the Tallest. And I wouldn't have to deal with these _morons_ on the Transportation Council telling me they need triple their budget from last year, because they're trying to replace half the ships in the Empire with _teleporters_."

"Well, I'm sorry. Maybe you should appoint a Temporal Manipulation Council, so you can send an Irken SWAT team back to vaporize me in the cradle."

"Mm. Or maybe I'll just have them spay you."

Vix, unimpressed by our witty banter, pushed herself to her feet and padded over to the foot of her bed. "Mummy, come play with me," she pleaded, tugging on the tails of Tak's gown.

"Not now, Vix. I'm having an existential crisis."

I choked on a snort of laughter. "You're having what kind of crisis?"

Tak lifted her head to nail me with a glare. "Don't be vulgar. You know that wasn't what I meant."

"Well, I certainly hope it wasn't. Otherwise I might have to spank you for talking dirty around the baby."

"I'm not a baby," Vix reminded me.

"Of course you're not." Absently, I picked up one of her dolls and smoothed my thumb over its face, tracing features almost impossibly intricate for something its size. "Come and play already, Sticky. It's got to be less stressful than Tallest-ing."

"That's debatable."

"Oh, stop whining. What are you, afraid of your own daughter?" Hoisting myself up off the floor, I headed over to the bed, grabbed Tak by the hand, and pulled her to her feet. "I'm tagging out. You're up."

Shaking out the kinks of two hours with my legs pretzel-crossed on the floor, I swung out the doors into the hall to flag down the nearest service drone, craving a soda and a taco. When I had my snack, I went back to Vix's room, climbed up onto her bed, and settled in to enjoy the spectacle that was Tak playing dolls.

As if it weren't funny enough just looking at the two of them side-by-side. Even after eleven years, Tak still sat like there was too much of her, like she wasn't quite sure where to put all of her limbs; she folded her legs as if they were a difficult piece of origami, and she always seemed to be either hunching or slouching. Her sleeves and the tails of her gown, which hung and flowed so elegantly when she stood, splashed across the floor like undammed rivers.

Watching her sitting there, frowning down at the doll in her hands, I thought about how she was so unlike her idols – the statues of her that towered above us everywhere we docked, on every planet she honored with her presence. I relished the knowledge that I'd shattered those statues before they were carved.

Vix, in contrast, was a ball of squirming, chattering energy, unfettered by anything more complicated than a little purple dress and leggings. Just from the way she sat – her legs shoved under her, the rest of her craning toward the dollship like a sunflower cranes toward the light – I could tell that she was completely at home in her own skin. In the way she moved, in the way she carried herself, she reminded me of Tak before I unsealed her: always purposeful, unashamed.

"Okay," Vix said, picking up a doll, "you be the bad space-monster attacking the ship, and I'll be all the good people inside."

"The _space-monster_? That's what this thing is meant to be?" Tak held her doll between one of her fingers and her thumb, away from her body, as if it might somehow infect her. "Is this even a documented species?"

"A—huh?" Vix furrowed her brow. "Just be the monster, okay? Make him—um—make him run around the ship and try to get people." I tried not to laugh as Tak sat staring at the doll, looking slightly sickened. "Well, go on!" Vix urged her. "Do it!"

With what had to be the least enthusiasm I'd ever seen her display for anything, Tak maneuvered the monster-doll hesitantly across one of the dollship's decks.

"Now make him say something," Vix instructed.

"What?"

"Make something up!"

Tak's shoulders slumped and she groaned, the hand that held her doll going limp with despair. "Vix, _please_. Be merciful."

If nothing else, at least Vix would grow up with a good vocabulary. "Uhh—make him say 'I'm gonna get you! Rarr!'"

"Vix, this is completely illogical. I'm not even sure a life form of this nature exists, and if it did, it would most likely be preverbal. Not to mention that it would never make it past the defenses on an Irken ship."

After a year of watching me do it in reply to Tak's laundry list of parenting hang-ups, Vix's new favorite gesture was a roll of her eyes. She employed it then, tilting her head back for added emphasis, nearly upending herself in the process. "Just _do _it, Mummy."

Tak looked at Vix, then across the room at me, silently begging me to step in and save her from the horrors of amateur acting. I smirked. She sighed. "I'm going to get you," she said at last, her voice flat, the words stilted, as she edged the monster-doll halfheartedly towards the doll in Vix's hand.

"_No_, Mummy!" Vix burst out. "You're not doing it right! He's a monster, you have to do a _scary_ voice! And you have to say 'rarr'!"

"That's enough," Tak said, dropping the doll and rising to her feet. "This is a pointless exercise. _You_ entertain her, child; you're the one with the patience for this nonsense."

I cracked up as she stalked through the doors, one of her gown's tails still creased where it had been stuck under her. "You ought to establish a Playtime Council," I called after her, grinning. "Maybe they could get that stick out of your—"

I paused, caught myself just in time. "Get the stick out of where, Mommy?" Vix asked as I came back over to sit with her.

"Nowhere. Now hand me that monster, will you? I'll scare the scales off you, babe."

I was never able to puzzle out an exact formula for how much Vix grew during the passing of what I called a year. She aged faster than a human, I knew, but how much faster wasn't set in stone; even Tak said she couldn't predict it.

I did figure out that it slowed down after the first year. When Vix was a year old, I guessed she was functionally around three, but when the next year rolled around she didn't strike me as six. In fact, she'd been raising hell about three years when I came to think of her as five.

Not that it really mattered. Tak said it was the human inside me (making me wonder when she'd forgotten there was human outside me, too) obsessing over the meaningless quantifications of age, trying to label Vix with numbers that didn't apply to her and made no difference anyway. It was hard, too, since she was a precocious kid—as I guess she'd have to be, raised like we were raising her.

You didn't grow up in an environment like the Massive and plod along at the back of the class. By the time Vix had lived for three years, she'd seen and done a million more things than most humans would in their lifetimes, and there were trillions yet to come; she learned to learn quickly.

She was intelligent and resourceful, inquisitive and strong-willed (the latter two being a particularly painful combination when she hit her "why?" stage). She was also immensely outgoing, which was unfortunate, as she spent a lot of time trying to endear herself to a crew that mostly saw her as – as Tak once put it – an abomination.

Some of them believed she was a blight on their species, a corruption of sacred Irken genetics. Some of them were terrified of her because she was a kid, and they had no clue what that was. All of them were nice to her because they had to be. But for everyone's sake, I tried to keep her out of their antennae, and she spent most of her time with Tak, Mimi or I—or Rel, who stuck to us like a barnacle no matter what.

One night, Vix and I sat outside one of the videoconference rooms, waiting for Tak to finish arguing with the Minister of Planetary Conversion. We were situated on the floor, cross-legged, facing one another, and I was teaching her a song to pass the time. It was one of those ear-wormy kids' songs you learn in preschool, along with the requisite pattern of knee- and hand-smacks that goes with it. I couldn't believe I'd remembered it this long.

"Down by the bay," I began, _slap-slap, slap-slap_

"Where the watermelons grow," Vix trilled faithfully, _slap-slap, slap-slap_

"Back to my home…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"I dare not go…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"For if I do…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"My mother will say…"(slap-slap, slap-slap)

"Did you ever see a whale with a polka-dot tail?"

"Down by the bay!" She always had to be the one to sing the last part – as loud as she possibly could, almost shouting. "Let's sing it again, Mommy! Please?"

I rested my head in my hand and sighed. At first, the song had been mildly entertaining. Now that we'd sung it about six squillion times, not to mention long since run out of things to see at the bay, I was thinking the Irkens had been onto something when they decided they didn't sing. "I have a better idea. Let's not, and say we did."

Suddenly, I heard the _whirr _of opening doors behind me, and glanced up over my shoulder to see Tak emerge from the videoconference room, massaging her temples and muttering something about the decay of the Empire. "Mummy!" Vix shrieked gleefully, startling her out of her funk. "I learned a new song! Wanna hear it?"

I widened my eyes at Tak and shook my head, mouthing _hell no. _"Uh—maybe some other time." Before Vix could start singing it anyway, Tak bent down, scooped her up, and lifted her up onto her shoulders. "Come along. We're going to bed."

We headed down the hall with Vix's legs hanging over Tak's shoulders, her little fists clutching Tak's antennae like reins, her plum-colored pigtails bobbing with the rhythm of Tak's stride. Whenever Tak was the one to fix her hair in the morning, she always ended up with pigtails: sometimes high, sometimes low, sometimes even in braids, but always pigtails.

I didn't know if Tak meant them to resemble antennae, or if something in her subconscious – something searching for a means to visually process the anomaly of Vix – guided her hands, but I just shook my head and smiled.

For awhile, the thrill of her newfound height was enough to keep Vix quiet. She wasn't Mimi, though, and information-gathering wouldn't satisfy her forever; after about thirty seconds of enjoying the view, she began to pelt us with questions.

"What's a watermelon?" she asked.

"It's a fruit," I answered.

"Oh." She rested her chin on the top of Tak's head. "What's a whale?"

"A really big animal that lives in the oceans on Earth."

"How big?"

"Didn't I tell you? _Really_ big."

"Bigger than Mummy?"

"It would pick its teeth with Mummy," I said, grinning. Tak snorted.

"Bigger than the Massive?"

"No."

"Because nothing's bigger than the Massive, right?" she said, blithely confident in the security of her world.

"Right," Tak confirmed, equally confident if not as blithe.

"I think we should go to Earth," Vix decided, "and see some whales, and some oceans. And some watermelons. And some humans."

Tak sniffed. "Trust me, there isn't much to see."

"Why do you want to see humans, Vix?" I asked.

She considered that. "Well, I've seen lots and lots of Irkens, but I've only ever seen one human. And I'm partly human. So it's like…" She wrinkled her nose in thought. "I don't know a whole half of who I am."

"Don't dwell on it," Tak grumbled.

Folding her legs and drawing her feet up onto Tak's shoulders, Vix pulled herself up to a standing position, using her grip on Tak's antennae to steady herself as she swayed. She scrambled half-up onto her head and dangled her face in Tak's line of sight, her pigtails swinging in midair. "You don't like humans, Mummy?" she asked, blinking questioningly into Tak's eyes.

Tak, wincing as Vix inadvertently jerked her antennae six ways to Sunday, popped a pair of silver limbs out of her pak to peel her off. "Not especially, no," she said, depositing Vix firmly back on her shoulders. "Do that again and you're walking."

"But you like Mommy."

She sighed. "Sometimes."

"Well, if you don't like humans, how did Mommy get here?"

It wasn't the first time she'd asked. She came to the question down different roads, but she always liked to hear the story, and I had fun coming up with new ways to tell it. Tak put up with it because she knew it would lull Vix to sleep. "Once upon a time," I began, "in a land far, far away, there was an abandoned lemon factory…"

Tak had equipped Vix with a tweaked pak at birth, but her biology was such that it didn't work quite like Tak's, or even mine. Its power cell was smaller and drained faster, so that until she was full-grown, she'd need to sleep every three nights or so.

Which was fine, since we'd managed to grind ourselves into the rut of sleeping near every night anyway. Most of the time, we dumped her in her own room to sleep, so that we could get down to the business that made going to bed worth it in the first place. But there were some nights when it didn't seem worth the walk.

Nights like tonight, when Vix was snoozing, slumped on Tak's shoulders, by the time we reached our room. When I had begun to add salacious details to my story, knowing she wouldn't wake for anything. When Tak lifted her off her shoulders, pushed back the blankets, and laid her in the center of our bed, as we went about shucking clothes and slipping on pajamas.

On nights like tonight, I would slide into bed on one side of Vix, and Tak on the other, and I would nestle against the warm, soft body between us, and half-smile into the red-purple pigtail tickling my nose.

"And _then_," I whispered, smoothing down the pigtail, raising my eyebrows at Tak, "I said, 'I'll just go treasure-hunting', and…"

Tak rolled her eyes and waved her hand over the panel by the bed, darkening the room. I let my voice fade with the light. Stroking Vix's hair, hearing and feeling her breathe, I waited until I knew Tak had snuggled up on her other side—until I could feel the pulse of her body through Vix's, her toes brushing mine at the foot of the bed. Then, I drifted into sleep, confident in the security of my world.


	29. A Lesson, a Transmission, and a Decision

RKB: You raise an interesting point about the number of Irkens in the Empire (and yes, the number I gave was referring strictly to Irken citizens). I did think a lot about the number I should give, and at times thought 20 billion was too small (as you pointed out, the Irken military operation no doubt requires a lot of manpower), and at others was afraid that increasing the number would make it unbelievable (I mean, 20 billion is already nearly three times the size of the human race).

In any case, as you said, the exact number of Irkens in the Empire isn't really an important plot point. So if it helps, you can imagine that when characters reference that number, it's a ballpark figure, and they're actually underestimating the size of the Empire's population.

**28. A Lesson, a Transmission, and a Decision**

_Tak speaking_

"Yowch!" Vix winced as my wavebreaker's anchor points made contact with her skin, securing themselves with two pairs of tiny teeth. "That hurts!"

"Oh, don't be a baby. It's barely a pinprick."

I frowned and folded my arms, narrowing one eye at the little creature facing me on the bridge. She stood there wearing her purple dress and black leggings, not unlike those I had worn when I was her size (and she _was_ about the size I'd been now, four years after her birth), and her hair in pigtails that sprayed like plum-colored fans from her head. Her mouth screwed up in a pout, she poked gingerly at the wavebreaker's frontal anchor point, engaging in the futile exercise of trying to twist her head to see it.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe you _are_ too young to learn how to use a wavebreaker."

"No! I'm ready!" She rallied at the challenge to her abilities, forgetting the pinpricks and puffing out her chest. "I can do it, Mummy! You'll see!"

"Fine." I sat down in my lounger and she scrambled up into my lap. "Now," I began, "I believe a wavebreaker is most useful as a means of interfacing with technology—" and could one really blame me for feeling a certain degree of distaste towards its other function? "—but that's a bit advanced for your first time. What I'm going to show you today is how it can be used to access the electrical impulses in other life forms."

Vix furrowed her brow. "What?"

I sighed. "You can look at somebody else, and make them do what you want them to."

She lit up. "Sweet!"

"But you don't use it all the time. Only when it's necessary." I looked at her meaningfully. "The reason I'm lending you mine instead of making you one is so I can take it back, when we're done here, and not have to worry about you using it to get yourself into trouble. You'll get one of your own when you're older."

"Okay," she muttered, her shoulders slumped.

"All right. Now—we'll need a test subject." I drummed my fingers on the arm of my lounger, glancing around at the bridge crew that ringed the platform. "You," I decided at random, pointing to one in a red coat. "Come up here and be of service to your Tallest."

He nodded and, somewhat hesitantly, came up onto to the platform. As he approached my lounger, a shared snicker rippled through the circle of his fellow crew members.

"Good," I said, swiveling Vix on my lap so that she sat facing him. "The first thing you need to do," I told her, setting my hands on her shoulders, leaning down to speak into her ear, "is make contact. That's half the battle right there. You focus on your target – eyes are usually best – and concentrate on accessing his brain waves. Don't think about commands. Just think about getting in."

Over her shoulder, I slit my eyes at the crew drone, warning him to make Vix's first experience with the wavebreaker a good one. She was bright, yes, but she was so young, and I doubted she had the brainpower to access anything smarter than a rock. Still, I'd wanted to introduce her to this early, so she'd be well-versed by the time she could really make use of it. And I knew she'd be more amenable to further lessons if she thought she was getting somewhere today – that is, if our test subject let her in.

Vix wasn't really a _princess_ – when my reign ended, she wouldn't be the one to succeed me – but at that time in our lives, she might as well have been, with me behind her metaphorically and (in that moment) literally. As I watched him over her shoulder, the crew drone allowed her to access him. The eyes peering out from above his collar grew wide and blank, all the will swirling out of them as if sucked down a drain. I steeled myself against a shudder.

"Good, good. Now – without breaking your focus – think of a command. Something simple. You can just think it in your head, or you can say it out loud."

Vix was quiet, considering. Even looking at the back of her head, I could picture her making her thinking-face – her nose wrinkled, her brow creased, her lips pressed into a thin line. Gaz said it looked a lot like mine, except for the part where I hadn't a nose to wrinkle.

"Quickly, Vix!"

Then, suddenly—just as she drew her breath to speak—I heard the doors to the bridge burst open behind us. Not slide, not whish, but _burst_, as if they'd been blown off their tracks by a bomb. Before I could whip around toward the noise, a white SIR unit with pink eyes shot across my field of vision, with a scream so loud and shrill it seemed to shake the entire bridge.

I had encountered this—_thing_ before, during my first few months on the Massive. When I asked one of the crew to explain it, she'd cast me a dour glance, and said only one word:

_Zim._

No elaboration was necessary.

I didn't care what he'd done to visit this shrieking monstrosity on the Massive; all I cared about was that the crew kept it under control. And they did, usually. It was only the occasional moment like this – when the thing ricocheted around the room, then dove into a cluster of cables near the viewscreen, chittering like a monkey – that found me heaving a groan, and thunking my head despairingly against the back of the lounger.

"I'm sorry, my Tallest!" Rel gasped as she rushed in after it, toting the translucent pink helmet I always saw the crew carrying when they were chasing the thing down. "I'll have it out of here in a second."

By that point, the exercise with the wavebreaker had crumbled completely; Vix had lost all semblance of focus, and she and I and the lucky little crew drone watched the spectacle from the platform. The SIR unit frolicked amongst the circuitry like a human child in a pile of leaves, cords and cables flailing and sparking as it jerked them from their ports. Rel waded through the wreckage after it, brandishing the helmet, crying, "PI, get back here! Don't touch that!"

At length, she managed to jam the helmet onto the thing's head, and a series of cables sprouted from the back of it and connected to the SIR's posterior panel. Instantly, its rampage ceased. It blinked around the room, the glow in its eyes dimming, a snapped cable dropping from its hand. Then, Rel by its side, it crawled out onto the main walkway and followed her back to the doors, its head hanging, its eyes halved.

As I craned my neck to watch it leave, wondering if I hadn't seen a pair of little pink ears sticking up from the helmet, the viewscreen began to flicker. "What's going on?" I demanded as the image of the course ahead disappeared, giving way to crackling static.

"The SIR unit's scrambled the frequencies," answered one of the crew, frowning down at his control panel. "We'll have it fixed in a—"

"Hey! Who on Irk are _you_?"

Before the crew drone could finish his sentence, a transmission-in-progress filled the viewscreen, and a singularly vile voice cut into my consciousness. I could actually feel my eyes expand with horror.

Nearly fifteen years ago, we had chosen to address the issue of Zim by not addressing it at all. When he called, the crew fed him cobbled-together bits of old transmissions from Red and Purple, sometimes with new audio tracks dubbed over the old ones, and he was too much of a moron to catch on.

As badly as I'd wanted him to know that _I_ was the one to whom he owed his allegiance now, the child had convinced me it probably wasn't a good idea; knowing Zim, he wouldn't exactly fall to his knees and admit defeat. The only thing that would come of it would be trouble for me and for the Empire, so I grudgingly conceded to keep him in the dark.

But now, there he stood in front of me, glaring at me impatiently. "What is this?" he yelled, in that voice that made me wish I were deaf, and nearly compelled me to clap my hands over Vix's ears. "Where are the Tallest? I was just talking to—"

The screen cut to black. "Apologies, my Tallest," said the same crew drone who had spoken before, cringing. "That wasn't supposed to have gotten through."

I sank back in the lounger, shell-shocked. Nauseated. Traumatized. I hated that snoorbeast-splunking worm all the more for wielding such power over me. "Who was that, Mummy?" Vix asked innocently, turning around.

"That," I muttered after a moment, once I found my voice, "was the single most horrible thing you will ever have the misfortune to see."

I lay there in the lounger for a long time, nursing the awful taste in my mouth. Saying nothing. Vix looked at me worriedly, waving a hand in front of my face; the crew exchanged nervous glances, wondering if some great explosion of wrath was forthcoming. But I wasn't interested in punishing them for letting Zim's transmission through. I had another thought – a far grander thought – brewing beneath my scowl.

"Vix," I said at last, "do you still want to go to Earth?"

She blinked at me. "What?"

Sitting up, I scooped her up under her arms, set her on the platform, and rose from the lounger beside her. "I had allowed myself to forget," I said, my voice gaining strength, addressing both Vix and the bridge crew, "but no more. The greatest shame I've suffered in my life was losing the Earth to Zim. Now, I shall redeem myself."

I swept my gaze over the crew, landing on the navigator in his purple coat. "Set a course for Earth," I ordered him. "We're adding a new planet to the Empire."


	30. Gaz's Obligations

This is unrelated to the following chapter, but to RKB, thanks so much for your awesomely long and detailed reviews. I've written stories that were much more popular than this one, but I've never received such thorough reviews, and they make me feel like it's worth it to keep posting.

One hopes, in writing something as long and involved as this, that it'll reach more than a handful of readers – but I understand that an M-rated TAGR epic may not be most Zim fans' cup of tea, and I'm grateful to know that _somebody_ out there is as invested in this as I am. :)

On a completely different but more story-related note, you know what I can't stand? When the fandom refers to Tak's human hologram as her "human form" or "human Tak." There _is no_ "human Tak", and she _does not_ _have _a "human form."

When Zim goes Clark Kenting, we don't say he's "in human form" or call him "human Zim"; if I dress up as a zebra for Halloween, I'm not "in zebra form", and I sure as hell hope no one would call me "zebra AAL." The hologram is a _costume. _Just because her disguise is better than Zim's doesn't mean she's literally a different person while she's wearing it.

**29. Gaz's Obligations**

_Gaz speaking_

"I thought you said we weren't going back to Earth. Not _ever_."

I stood on the bridge watching Tak pace back and forth over the platform, the tails of her gown switching and swishing when she whirled around, brimming with the exhilaration of a new conquest. "That was before I knew I'd be in a position to conquer it," she said, her voice bright with conviction. "And it's the perfect time. The Production Council has been pestering me for more money to buy assembly-line machinery; this way, I can give them a workforce seven billion strong, _and _more space to build factories."

Less disturbed by the prospect of the mass enslavement of humanity than I probably should've been, I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. "Okay. Whatever floats your boat, Sticky." I flopped down in her lounger, winding a lock of hair around my finger. "It'll be fun to see what's become of it, I guess."

She paused, frowning. "What do you mean, _what's become of it_? We're not going to the surface. I can oversee the operation from the Massive."

"Oh, come on. We're going back to Earth for the first time in fifteen years, and I can't even go see if my brother's a hobo yet?" I rolled my eyes. "Please. _You_ can stay up here if you want, but _I'm_ going down. And I'm taking Vix with me."

"What? Why?"

"Well, she said she wanted to see Earth, didn't she? Whales and watermelons. And humans." I shot Tak a loaded glance. "You might not enjoy thinking about it, but that's half her heritage, Tak. I'm not complaining about your razing my home planet and terrorizing my people – God knows most of them deserve to be terrorized – I'm just saying Vix ought to see Earth while she still can. That's not too much to ask."

She let out a great, put-upon sigh. "_Fine. _I suppose it isn't. Maybe once she gets the stench of humanity in her nose, Vix will stop with this _half-of-who-I-am_ nonsense, and start feeling glad that she's not _all_ human."

I snorted. "You know, for someone whose shoulders are permanently tattooed with your mid-crisis claw-marks, I never feel very appreciated around you."

Her cheeks went a truly gorgeous shade of turquoise, summoning a grin to my lips. "You know I don't really think of you as _human_ anymore," she mumbled, which was probably the biggest compliment she could bring herself to give me, given that I'd just mortified her in front of the entire bridge crew.

"Aww, Sticky. You're going to make me tear up."

She recovered by striking up another round of pacing, the _clack_ of her boots the background track to her voice. "Okay, so you'll go down with the prep crew and spend a few days on Earth – no more than three – then come back up when the surface is cleared for beaming. We'll need to establish temporary colonies for the humans while we reformat the terrain, and program the teleporters for practical biology selection, and appoint administrators for the settlements…"

While Tak planned out loud, I sat in her lounger staring at the viewscreen, displaying a video feed of the space surrounding us. I thought about seeing Earth on that viewscreen, the blue-green thumbprint I'd wiped from her windshield more than fifteen years ago.

I thought about sidewalks, city buses, grocery stores, grass. I imagined the road I'd followed every day on my way home from school, and wondered if my feet would remember the way. I thought about the building where Bloaty's used to be and my plushies slumped on the shelves of my room. My clothes beneath a blanket of dust in their drawers. A bowl of cereal with milk. Taking a frickin' shower.

I made a bet with myself, then and there, that nothing had changed. My classmates, my old girlfriends – they'd have grown up, but they'd be as stupid as before, leading stupid boring lives in their stupid suburban houses with their stupid smiling spouses staring vacuously at them across the dinner table every night. They would have stupid paper-pushing jobs in tiny cubicles, and stupid kids who broke their china and crossed the street without looking.

Dad would ask me if I'd had fun at my sleepover, and Dib would be hunched over at his computer, muttering to himself, sure he was just on the verge of outing Zim to the world. We'd be doing them a favor, putting them to work for the Empire. At least then there'd be a point to their lives.

"Tak?" I said.

"Mm?"

"I think when Vix and I go down, we're going to go see Dib and my dad. And I'm going to ask them if they want to come up with us before you relocate everyone."

She looked at me as if I'd just told her I was going to shove her out the airlock. "No, you're not."

I sighed. "I don't think I have a choice."

"You're right, you don't," she snapped. "A week from now, _you_ are going to be the only human in the universe who's not either dead or in an Irken colony, and that is _not _up for debate. Do you understand me, child?"

Ignoring her bluster, I shook my head slowly, chewing on the unpleasant realization that I might actually have a conscience. Or a sense of obligation, anyway. "I have to at least ask them, Sticky. I wouldn't feel right if I didn't. They're my _family_, and aside from Vix, they're the only family I have. I feel like I owe them the chance to choose better lives for themselves."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "I refuse to allow it."

"Come on. My dad's practically an old man by now. He'll be around a few more decades and then he'll kick it – what's the harm in letting him retire somewhere nicer than an Irken colony?"

I rearranged my gown over my knees, smoothing the folds in the silk. Once I'd become the mother of what I figured was basically the Irken princess, I'd decided I needed something swankier than my striped dress and leggings – something longer, more regal, with a more elegant silhouette. Not like Tak's explosion of swirling, sweeping Queen of the Universe shit, but—you know. Classy.

"And Dib—well, I guess I just feel bad for Dib. Life's fucked him over enough, you know? And I'm sure it'll find lots of ways to fuck him over again, even without you making him a slave."

"You can attempt to reason with me all you like, child. The answer will still be no."

I frowned, bothered less by her refusal to listen to my logic than by the possibility of losing the argument. I always had hated to lose. "Well, what about the fact that my dad is 'the man without whom the world falls into chaos', and my brother is the most persistent little anti-Irken Earth Warrior you're ever going to meet?

"If anyone's going to find a way to cause trouble in your colonies, it'll be them. Wouldn't it be easier to get them out of the way from the beginning, so they won't be screwing up your operation before it gets off the ground?"

She sneered at me. "Wouldn't they be in a better position to _screw up my operation _if they weren't in the colonies, where they belong?"

"No, because _I'd _be able to keep tabs on them, and so would you. You're always moaning about the incompetence of your councils. If you recognize that they might present a problem, you should want them where _you_ can decide what's done with them, not Minister Whosawatsis and Councillor Whatsername. Right?"

Now _that_ upset her, because she knew I had a point. She looked at me for awhile with slivered violet eyes, her cheek sucked in so that I knew she was biting the inside of her mouth. Then, she let out a long, growling groan and stalked over to the lounger, looming over me, shoving her face down an inch from mine.

"You may offer your family the chance to escape slavery," she snarled, "but if they accept, _you_ will be responsible for them. And if they make me regret allowing this, _you_ will pay the price."

I flashed her a grin. "Thanks." Before she could straighten up, I slung my arm around her neck and kissed her, then pressed my lips to her cheek, murmuring, "I _want _this to work for you, okay, Sticky? I want to hear your crazy victory-laugh. I'm not going to do anything to screw it up."

I felt her cheek warm against my lips before she wriggled away, clearing her throat. "Yes, well. If you're going to see Dib, I think I should come with you." One corner of her mouth curled in an unpleasant smile. "I'd like to see his face when you tell him he's finally lost his little war for good."

So I went with her to one of the labs on the main deck, where they kept the hologenerator: a device comprised mostly of a large screen on a stand against one wall, slanted like a writing desk. Breezing quickly through a series of menu screens, Tak brought up a template for a hologram the size of a human child – that is, the size of the average Irken, and at that time, the size of Vix.

"It should be simple enough to disguise Vix," she said as she detached a stylus from the screen's frame. "Her hologram will look basically like she does now, just with human overlays for her skin and eyes. And I suppose it should be dressed somewhat differently, too."

I peered over her shoulder, watching her scribble her edits onto the template. As her stylus darted across the screen, I saw the image of a human girl, six or seven years old, take shape: plum-colored pigtails, pale skin, pink cheeks. Eyes with that particular shade of purple shining only in the irises. Tak gave her a lavender shift dress with black boots and striped tights, then looked at me for approval; I shrugged my assent.

She hit a button and a tube dropped down from the ceiling, spitting a silver orb the size of a golf ball into her palm. Rolling it between her index finger and thumb, she handed it over to me.

"This is a holoprojector," she said, as if I wouldn't have figured that out. "It adapts to several less-conspicuous forms, though I find it's best worn as a cuff or a bracelet. Hold onto it for now; I don't want to give it to Vix and have her lose it.

"Now," she went on, returning to the screen, "I uploaded my old hologram into the generator awhile ago, so if we begin from there…"

She opened a new file, and a second image blipped onto the screen – the eleven-year-old girl with Tak's beauty mark, a perpetual smirk, and choppy blue-purple hair. I cocked an eyebrow. "Uh, I hate to break it to you, Sticky," I said, "but I don't think it'll still fit."

"I _know_ that, child. Do you think I'm stupid?" She touched an icon in the corner of the screen, and a question popped up in a little box: _Transfer to new template? _"I'm going to age her up."

As I watched, the smug little girl flickered and grew, her pixels scattering like seeds blown from a dandelion. They took form again as a tall, slender young woman, the same violet irises staring out from beneath her shadow-heavy eyelids, the same knowing grin hitching her lips.

Her hair was the same shade of indigo, but it was longer, swinging at the small of her back. Her dress, striped purple-on-purple, answered the newly-realized dip and swell of her torso. The last stripe slid across her thighs midway to her knees, and black tights climbed her legs beneath it.

Tak glanced over her shoulder at me. "You're a better judge than I am. What do you think?"

I flicked my tongue over my lips. "Pretty hot. But I could do better."

Elbowing her out of the way, I grabbed the stylus and rubbed out a slice of white skin between the woman's dress and tights, transplanting the straps and buckles from her ankles to turn the tights into thigh-high boots. I gave her a swipe of lipstick and a sexy little cat-eye. I thickened her hair, then thickened her curves, drawing on an ass that would fill out a pair of Apple Bottoms and a rack to more than match.

Finally, to ensure myself a good view of my own masterpiece, I erased the fill on the symbol (really just Tak's insignia without antennae; super subtle, right?) emblazoned across her chest, and drew a deep V of cleavage peeking through the keyhole.

Tak frowned. "And that's—_better_?"

I pressed the _Generate _key and caught the orb as it dropped from the tube, presenting it to her with a smile. "Well, we'll see."

Shaking her head at me, she tapped the holoprojector against the inside of her wrist. Immediately, it transformed into a thin silver bangle, and enveloped her in a burst of colored static. When it faded—well, I'm pretty sure I had to collect my jaw from the floor.

"What are you staring at?" she demanded, scowling. "What's wrong with you?"

I allowed a good, long pause before I answered, taking my sweet time appreciating my work of art. My eyes traveled slowly upwards, absorbing her bit by bit. Stiletto heels. Leather-dipped legs. Hips, waist, tits (luscious fucking tits, I swear to God, like a couple of baking buns – not crispy, not yet beginning to brown, but rising soft and white and perfect in the oven window) wrapped in purple-on-purple stripes. Hair you could bury your hands in. High cheekbones, full lips, smoldering eyes. Playmate of the fucking Year.

Sweet cyborg Christ.

"Remind me, Sticky—are these tangible holograms? Like Vix's dollship?"

"Well, of course they are," came her voice from those gorgeous, glistening lips, ripe and red as a pomegranate. "Otherwise, they'd—"

"Come here," I cut in, extending a hand to beckon her.

Her cheeks flushed pink (_pink_! It seemed almost absurd, after fifteen years), but she obeyed, her stiletto heels clicking, making her hips sway. When she was near enough, I reached up, slid my arms over her shoulders, and kissed her.

It was a long, hard, searing kiss, communing with a mouth and tongue and teeth I didn't know, carding my hands into that silky sea of hair, feeling those beautiful tits pressed against me. Tasting smoke and metal and cardamom, still, undiluted by the hologram. Indelible Sticky Tak. I smiled against her lips.

When I pulled away, I looked up to find her eyes, searching for the pinpoint of that particular shade of purple. "So," I purred. "How many nights til we get to Earth?"


	31. The Stench of Humanity

Hey, what _did _happen to Dwicky? For that matter, what happened to all those human babies that were beamed up to the alien-baby (fuck if I can figure out how to spell the name of their race) mothership in Plague of Babies? For the purposes of this story, they're…uh, doing something that's not important to this story. I'm sure there are other fanfics on the subject, though.

You know, I _like _the idea that Dib's hair gets more and more ridiculous as he ages. I think it's cute. :p

**30. The Stench of Humanity**

"I knew you would come," Dib said, frowning, when he answered the door. "I didn't know you were bringing an entourage."

"Well, that's me. Full of surprises." I raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to let us in?"

He moved aside, and my _entourage_ and I filed in – first Vix, shepherded by Mimi, then Tak, so I could enjoy the view of her fine holographic ass. She wrinkled her nose as I shut the door behind us, no doubt at the stench of humanity (I could definitely smell it now) pervading the house.

"How did you _know_ we would come?" she said skeptically, narrowing her eyes at Dib.

"Uh, you've kind of got your flagship docked about a foot outside the atmosphere. Maybe ¡Nasaplace! doesn't have the funding to notice it, but_ I_—" Suddenly, he paused, blinked. Looked at her incredulously. "_Tak_?"

"Who did you think she was, the Queen of England?" I snarked.

"No, it's just…" He looked her up and down, lingering a second too long on the keyhole in her dress. I bit back something that was either a snicker, or a snarl like a dog defending a slab of meat. "You got taller."

A grin parted her human hologram's red lips. "Thanks for noticing."

I rolled my eyes. "Don't let him flatter you so easily, Sticky," I said, clapping her on the shoulder and steering her over to the couch. "It's embarrassing."

I flopped down on the couch next to Tak. Mimi nosed Vix up onto the cushion on my other side, then leapt into her lap, circling a few times before curling up nose-to-tail, her head between her forepaws. Dib pushed the armchair by the door around to the other side of the coffee table, back to the TV, and plunked himself down to stare at us.

He hadn't changed much. It'd been nearly sixteen years since I'd last seen him, and he must have been thirty-three, but the uphill climb from seventeen had left him with little but longer hair (his hair, amusingly enough, seemed constantly in a state of transformation – it had begun as a scythe, become a zigzag, and now it was a lightning bolt, like the one you'd see a cartoon Zeus flinging from his fluffy cloud) and a few lines on his face.

He'd grown a little, and though I couldn't tell with them sitting down, I thought he might even have an inch on Tak. I guessed he was about as tall as Dad had been – six-one on a good day, to my five-seven, maybe five-eight.

He was wearing a jacket, a T-shirt, jeans. The same glasses perched on his nose. A little more of a slouch when he sat. I'd known without asking that he would still live here, with Dad, sleeping in the same bed he'd slept in all his life and snarfing the same cereal we'd fought over when we were kids, eyes glazing over in front of the same screen with the same UFO screensaver.

Hoping the same hopes. Dreaming the same dreams. I saw without seeing the slope he was skidding down, losing a little more traction every day; I could smell the dank terminus of that route. It would've been hilarious, if it hadn't been so frickin' _sad._

I sighed inwardly. Too late to pity him now.

"Well, obviously you know Tak," I said, figuring introductions were as good a starting point as any, "and Mimi—" I nodded to the cat on Vix's lap "—and this is our hybrid freak spawn, Vix."

I nodded to let Vix know she could shut off her holoprojector, and the image of the human girl overlaid over hers flickered out. Dib's eyes were the size of basketballs. "Who are you?" Vix asked him, her pigtails bobbing as she cocked her head.

"He's your uncle," I answered for him, when his mouth, hanging open, failed to produce words.

"What's an uncle?"

"It means he's my brother."

"What's a brother?"

"It means we have the same parents."

Vix thought about that. "I want a brother!" she said brightly. "Can I have a brother, too?"

I snorted. "Ask Mummy."

"Will you make me a brother, Mummy?"

Tak made a face like she'd swallowed a chunk off a cactus. "_No._ Never. Not in a thousand years."

"But why _not_?"

"Well, look at your mother. Does she look like she's enjoying hers?"

I shrugged and nodded, conceding, "She has a point."

"Humph." Slumping over on the couch, she frowned up at Dib, who had yet to contribute anything to the conversation. "Well, no offense, My Uncle," she said, "but you're really boring. Is there anything else to do around here?"

"Sure," I said. "Go upstairs and…play, or something. Take Mimi with you."

Vix slid happily off the couch and headed around it to the stairs, Mimi snapping out of her cat hologram as she followed. "And don't touch anything!" Tak yelled over the back of the couch. "I don't want you contaminating yourselves with the human filth in this house!"

When the last stair in the flight had creaked under their weight, the gears in Dib's head finally started grinding again. "You have a—_daughter_?" he said, his voice strangled, looking from me to Tak and back again. "With _her_?"

"No, with the Pope. _Yes_, with _her_, dumbass, who else?"

"So that means that you two…are…"

Tak's head pitched forward and she buried her face in her hands, groaning. I cocked an eyebrow at Dib. "Did you not realize that before we left?"

"Well, I thought maybe, knowing you—but—"

"But what? I get alien bitches. It is what it is."

Dib reached up to rub his temples, as if Tak's headache were contagious. "Okay. Okay. So you're—uh—_involved_, and you've engineered this hybrid baby, and—_that's_ what you've been doing all this time? Playing intergalactic house?"

"That's not _all _we've been doing," I said. "We've also been kicking ass and taking names." As Tak straightened up, she shook off her hologram, punctuating my point. "Long story short, Tak's the Almighty Tallest, and we're kind of running the Irken Empire. I could tell you why and how, but I don't really feel like going into the latter, and if I explained the former, I think she'd kill me."

Tak glowered warningly in my direction. "You mean you _know_," she hissed, clearly less than enthusiastic about the prospect of airing the dirty details of our sex life in front of Dib.

She needn't have worried. I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to tell him, either. "Yes, I _know_. Don't get your antennae in a knot."

Dib just sat gripping the arms of the chair, stunned. Whatever he'd expected to hear when I came home after fifteen years, this obviously wasn't it.

So he sat there like he'd been slapped with a double dose of elephant tranquilizer, gawking at his sister the Irken fleet commander and her girlfriend the Queen of the Universe, at me curled up on the couch with my cheek resting on my fist and Tak with her gown vomiting silver and purple all over the dingy carpet. Floundering in the patter of little hybrid footsteps reverberating through the ceiling above us, and the _crash_ of little hybrid elbows knocking something over in his room. I could almost smell the drool collecting in his slackened jaw.

"So…why did you come back?"

"Because Tak decided it was time to get down to unfinished business, and fill the—"

"If you make one more crack about the snack plan," she growled before I could finish, glaring at me from the corners of her eyes, "I'm going to leave this filthy house and this filthy planet right now, and leave _you _here to experience the takeover with the rest of your people. How's _that _for a plan?"

"Jesus. Touch-y." Smirking, I amended, "Okay, so we're not filling anything with snacks this time. But we _are_ assuming control of Earth. We're going to turn it into—what were we going to turn it into, Sticky?"

"Well, I was thinking a minor-machinery manufacture planet."

"Right, a minor-machinery manufacture planet. Nuts and bolts. And guess which lucky race gets to help us out with free labor?"

His face, pasty-white though it was, evinced a disappointing lack of shock. Apprehension, yes, and anger, and a touch of nausea, but for once that day, he wasn't surprised. I got the feeling that the truth of our visit had been gnawing at him awhile before I voiced it. "You can't do that."

The words were brittle, easy to cut down. "We're not here to argue over what we can or can't do. We're—_I'm _here to make you an offer."

I slid one of my legs over the other, lacing my fingers in my lap. "You're my brother, Dib. You're the worst brother I could've asked for, and you've never done anything but embarrass me and piss me off—but you're pathetic, and I feel sorry for you. So I'm giving you the chance to blow this taco truck before shit gets serious – to come with us and transplant your loser life into space, instead of spending it as a slave to the Empire. How does that sound?"

For several long minutes, he was silent, staring at his feet. When he did speak, he sounded numb. "You can't—" he began again, when would he realize we _could_ do _anything_? "—expect me to do that."

"Can't expect you to what?" I asked. "Accept the best opportunity you're ever going to get?"

"You can't expect me to just _abandon_ the human race."

"Yeah? What has the human race ever done for you?" I shook my head. "God, you're stupid. Thirty-three years, and you still haven't figured out that humanity will_ never_ want your help – and even if it did, there's nothing you can do. This isn't Zim you're dealing with, Dib. You don't have a snowball's chance in hell."

"Zim." Suddenly, his eyes widened. "What are you going to do about Zim?"

Tak dug her claws into the arm of the couch, the line of her shoulders rippling like the hackles of a cat. "Zim has no sister to plead his case," she hissed at him, "so he will be eliminated before he can present a problem. I'm not as stupid as the Tallest before me."

He shrunk back in his armchair, swallowing hard. "And Dad?"

"He'll get the same offer as you, once we leave here," I said. "Though I may have to couch it in different terms."

He rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, half-wilted, half-tensed. I couldn't tell if he was giving up, or loading his gun for a few more futile shots. "I just—" He let out a short huff of breath. "I just can't believe you would come here, and tell me this – tell me you're _taking over the Earth_ and _enslaving humanity_, like you're—like you're handing me a fucking party invitation – and just expect me to swallow it. I can't believe you didn't think I would fight back."

"We expect you to fight back, Earth swine," Tak snapped. "We don't expect you to pose a threat."

Tak rose from the couch with a contemptuous flourish of her gown, clearly having decided we were done here. Across the coffee table, Dib stood up too, and she stiffened visibly at the realization that she couldn't look down on him.

It wasn't as if Tak refused to acknowledge the existence of anyone taller than she was. There were plenty of races out there that grew taller than even the tallest of Irkens, and she dealt with their dignitaries regularly and civilly. Most of the time, though, that happened via videoconference, or from a throne or platform in a receiving hall. In fifteen years, she'd never really had to share her vertical territory—and now, she stood poised as if to defend it.

"We've done what you wanted to do, child," she spat at me, readier than ever to move on with our agenda. "I'm taking my leave of this pit."

Her hologram flickered on halfway to the door, turning her sullen prowl into an appetizing stiletto-sway. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she screamed up the stairs, "MIMI! VIX! GET DOWN HERE!"

Mimi zipped in a black blur down the stairs, sliding to a stop at Tak's feet with a switch of her tail. A few seconds later, Vix padded down after her, choosing each step carefully (for someone who'd grown up riding floor to floor on hoverdiscs, stairs were one of many challenges Earth living posed). When she reached the bottom, Tak raised an eyebrow, and she scrambled to activate her hologram.

Tak opened the door and Mimi pranced out into the sunlight, Vix close behind. "Are you _coming_, child?" she said impatiently, tapping her hologram's glinting purple nails against the edge of the door.

"Give me a minute, Sticky." I threw a glance at Dib. "I want to chat with my brother alone."

She sighed and swept out the door, shutting it with a _thud_ behind her. In her wake, the house filled with the breath of silence, cold and stale. Without Tak and Vix and Mimi to distract me, I felt the smell of the air settle into my bones.

A smell like dust, and dead things. Like dry rot on a tree. The room seemed larger now, animated only by my presence and Dib's nonentity, but I was suddenly claustrophobic.

"Listen, Dib," I said, rising to my feet, "I know you think you're going to be the Savior of Humanity, and you're going to take down the Armada with nothing but faith, trust and pixie dust, and everyone who pushed you around when we were kids will suddenly realize you're the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise; I'll let that illusion crumble on its own."

I came around to the other side of the coffee table, grabbed a fistful of his T-shirt's collar, and jerked his face down an inch from mine. "But I _am_ going to tell you this: taking the Earth is a big deal to Tak. It's not a tactically useful planet, it doesn't produce anything we need, and God knows its people aren't anything special—but it _is_ the site of her old shame, and a million other conquests wouldn't make up for losing it.

"So if you do _anything_ to screw this up for her, you won't just have the Irken Empire to deal with. _I'll_ personally make sure you regret it."

He stared back at me with irritating determination. "If you're making a special effort to threaten me," he said, "that must mean there_ is_ something I can do."

"No." I let him go. "You can't stop the inevitable. But what you _can_ do – what you've always specialized in doing, in every situation – is make getting there more painful for everyone, on our side _and_ yours. I don't particularly care if more humans die because of you. But I _do_ want this to go smoothly for Tak. Thus," I added, crackling my knuckles one by one, "my warning stands.

"Relocation begins in three days. If you decide to accept my offer, this will take you where you need to go." I popped an arm out of my pak and passed him a handheld navigator, enjoying the look on his face as the silvery limb retracted back into its port. "If not—well. Have fun in the colonies."

I turned and headed for the door, more than ready to push the stench of decay from my nostrils. When my hand was on the knob, Dib spoke to my back. "How can you do this?" he said. "How is this so—_okay_ with you? I mean, I know you never really liked…anyone, but is this really what you want to happen to them? You're _human_, Gaz. You should be on our side."

I didn't turn around. Instead, I looked down at my reflection between my fingers, stretched almost beyond recognition by the curve of the doorknob. "In a few months," I said, "I'll have been with Tak as long as I lived on Earth."

I cracked open the door, and a ribbon of yellow sunlight leapt across the carpet. "I don't really think of myself as _human_ anymore."


	32. Burning the Earth, Part I

RKB: I feel like saying that you can't accept (what basically boils down to) Rule of Funny as the reason for Zim's continued existence is…well, kind of like demanding that Pokémon give a detailed explanation of how a yellow rat can spontaneously generate electricity. Some things are just part of a given work's universe, and there really _isn't_ a reason for them; they're there because they're part of the story, whether you want to accept it or not.

I mean, sure, there are fanfics out there positing that Red and Purple secretly like Zim, that one of them's in love with Zim, that Zim's immortal, that some arcane Irken law is preventing them from disposing of him, that Zim is the Chosen One and he's being preserved for some special purpose—you could sit around fanwanking all kinds of explanations for the fact that near-all of the Empire's problems would be solved if the Tallest just threw Zim out an airlock, and clearly, some people do.

So far, I have yet to come across a theory that I feel really holds water. And you know what? I'm not looking for one. Zim is what Zim is. If you spend every episode obsessing over this show's many logical inconsistencies, you'll miss all the other great things it has to offer. By the way, please don't take any of the above as a personal attack on you; if you want to seek valid answers in other fanfics, more power to you. I'm just devoting way too much time and effort into explaining my stance on the whole thing.

ANYWAY. Two things:

1) Yay, another reviewer! Thanks for de-quieting, Surrogate-Reality :).

2) This chapter is mostly fun, calm-before-the-storm kind of fluff, and next time we have a bit of a curveball. AAL: making readers go "uhHUUHhh" (think Zim at the end of "Vindicated!") since 1991.

**31. Burning the Earth, Part I**

I left Tak, Mimi and Vix in the lobby of Membrane Labs, feeling that the second of my two visits would go best without them. And fortunately, I managed to catch Dad at a good time: he wasn't in a conference, or taping his show, or surrounded by a cluster of lab techs.

I found him alone in a lab at the end of a long, grey corridor, leaning over a limp hamster on a silver tray, poking its exposed brain with a little silver pick. Like Dib, he looked much the same as I'd left him, albeit with a little grey in his hair and a few bags under his goggles. And his voice hadn't lost any strength with age.

"Daughter!" he exclaimed as the door swung shut behind me, glancing up from the hamster's brain. "How nice to see you! It's been quite some time!"

"Sure has, Dad. Nice to see you, too."

That being, apparently, that, Dad exchanged his pick for a pair of tongs, and began to attempt the delicate procedure of removing the hamster's brain from its skull cavity. "What brings you by today?"

"Well, the Earth's about to be taken over by aliens. And since my girlfriend – remember? The one I told you about before? – is kind of their leader, I've got a chance to see if you and Dib want to come up to the flagship with us before she beams everyone to the off-world colonies, and levels everything to make room for factories."

The hamster's brain, which was evidently slippery, slid out of the tongs for the third time. Dad shook his head sadly. "Clearly, I've neglected you too long. We've grown so far apart that you feel you have to invent insane—" he said it like he'd always said it in reference to Dib, _insane!_ "—stories just to spend time with your own father. Where did I go wrong?"

He threw his hands up tongs and all, splattering hamster-brain juice in a wide arc across the tile. "WHERE?!"

Slamming his gloved palms down on the worktable, he declared, "I know! We need _bonding time_!" He boomed the words as if he were presenting a new breakthrough to a roaring crowd. "Let's go out for dinner! We'll go to that pizza restaurant you're so fond of—what was it called—Bloaty's! We'll go to Bloaty's!" Pressing a few buttons on the device clipped to his coatsleeve, he added, "And it just so happens I've got some room in my schedule. How about tomorrow night at eight?"

"Perfect." When Dad bent his head down over the hamster, I produced another navigator from my pak, this time dropping it into my own hand. "Come and meet me at my house, okay? The address is in this."

"Sure thing, honey!" He looked up once more as I laid the navigator on his worktable. "Did you need anything else?"

"Nope. See you tomorrow, Dad."

"Well, it's about time," Tak snapped when I returned to the lobby, crankier than usual in a lab that wasn't hers. I inclined my head towards the doors and we all tumbled out together, Mimi nudging Vix down the stairs one at a time, Tak's holographic tits bouncing under her dress. "What did he say?" she said, jerking my eyes back up to her face.

"What do you think he said? I told him the truth; he thought I was bullshitting him. We have a pizza date tomorrow night." I shrugged. "I figure he'll show up, we'll stun-gun him, and when the dust settles we'll find him something to do. Stick him with the Research and Development Council, give him a lab and a handful of techs. If they do a good job, he won't even notice they're not human."

"Fine. Then we can return to the temporary base."

"What, already? All business and no fun?" I hooked my arm through hers, tugging her in the opposite direction from the neighborhood where the prep crew had pitched their camp. "Come on, I want to swing by the mall. I haven't been to a mall in fifteen years."

She frowned. "You just want everyone you used to know around here to see you in the company of this tramp you've turned me into."

"Very true." I craned up to plant a kiss on her cheek. "But I'm also dying for a corndog."

The smells of a mall: humanity. Cinnamon rolls. Floor wax and plastic trees. Metal, after you walk with your hand curled around the railing on the second floor, then press your palm to your nose. Crisply-folded clothes by the storefronts. Vomit and sliced bananas by the playplace.

Dump it all into a blender with fluorescent lights, frigid AC, and the incomprehensible din of a milling crowd, and you have a good third of my adolescent life. Knocking it back was like stepping into a time machine.

"Where are we?" Vix asked when we'd cleared the revolving door, blinking down the hallway at the panoply of shops and stands. "What are we doing here?"

"We're at the mall," I answered. "And we're here because it's the best cross-section of human cultures and customs you'll ever have the privilege to observe."

"Yes, and you'd best _observe _closely," Tak said snidely. "They're about to go extinct."

We headed first to the food court on the first floor, swollen with the smells of sugar and grease. With Tak sour-faced and Vix wide-eyed, we passed steaming silver bins of lo mein and sesame chicken, discs of paper-thin New York-style pizza, guys in aprons and paper hats shaving slices of meat from kebab spits. Finally, we arrived at a corner stall, with a teenage girl working the register and a single word lit up above her head: _FOOD!_

"Okay. Sweet." Digging a few bills out of my jeans pocket (hey, money's no object when you've got a matter generator in your closet), I glanced up at the menu board, and ordered, "Jumbo Coke and a corndog. Wait, make that two corndogs. And chili-cheese fries. Aaand…"

I glanced down at Vix, who was gawking at the menu board like she'd gawked at the first humans we'd seen on the way to Dib's. "Can she eat human food?" I asked Tak in Irken, looking over my shoulder at her.

She winced. "Well, she—"

"I mean, you said her guts were mostly human, right? So she should be able to eat human food."

"_Yes_, technically, but I'd really rather she didn't—"

"And a Belgian waffle," I said to the cashier, switching back to English. "With chocolate sauce. And ice cream."

"You're not feeding her this filth, child," Tak said with a scowl when I turned away from the counter. "Just because she _can_ eat it doesn't mean she _should_."

"Come on, lighten up. Human food isn't going to kill her. And she's only got one chance to try it."

A minute later, the girl slid my order onto the counter on a red plastic tray, and I picked it up and staked out a nearby table. Squirting the contents of a mustard packet onto the tray, I swirled a corndog in it and shoved it into my mouth, in what was literally the biggest bite I could manage. I swear to God, the sensation was orgasmic. I'd scarfed it down to the stick by the time I noticed Vix in the chair beside me, and Tak watching me from across the table with undisguised revulsion.

"God, that's good," I sighed, licking the crumbs off the stick. "Sorry, Sticky, but there are some things Irkens don't do as well as good old Earth swine."

Taking a slurp of my soda, I picked up the Belgian waffle – a culinary marvel buried in hot fudge and melting vanilla ice cream, probably about the size of my head, and so heavy I had to hold the paper plate with both hands – and plunked it down on the table in front of Vix. "I think that's the half of you you've been missing."

"I told you, she is _not _eating that!" Tak reached out to pull the plate away herself, then shrank back at the last second, as if she feared it might be excreting some kind of toxin. "That thing is a _monstrosity_—you'll poison her!"

I unwrapped a plastic fork, shoveled up as much waffle, chocolate and ice cream as I could, and popped it into Vix's mouth. For a second, she screwed up her face in thought, deciding how she felt about it. Then, she swallowed, and the pupils of her holographic eyes went huge. She licked her lips, as if trying to recoup as much of the flavor as she could, before she remembered there were about twenty pounds of waffle still waiting for her on the table. Snatching the fork from my hand, she went at it like a wrestler leaping into the ring, in an explosion of ice cream and chocolate sauce.

Tak narrowed her eyes at me. I picked up my second corndog, and smirked. "You're just jealous."

She shook her head and pulled Mimi onto her lap, stroking her, muttering to herself in Irken about how this planet was begging to be assimilated. I demolished my second corndog and dove into my chili-cheese fries. Vix attacked her waffle, sawing off chunks with the edge of her fork and gulping them down, splattering her cheeks, her eyebrows and the wobbling fans of her pigtails with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge.

As I was scooping up the last glob of chili with my last fry, I heard Vix erupt with a truly impressive belch, and her fork clatter onto the tray. Tak looked so green I wondered if her hologram was glitching. "Vix, are you…all right?"

"I'm great, Mummy," Vix said sleepily, as a smile spread over her chocolate-smeared lips. "That was great."

"I knew it would be. Way to champion it, babe." I grabbed a napkin, leaned over, and wiped as much of her mess as I could from the hologram's flushed cheeks, knowing we couldn't exactly pop by the bathroom and clean her up in the sink. "It's not all bad being half-human, huh?"

Vix nodded, swayed, and promptly collapsed in a sugar coma, her forehead _thunk_ing onto the table in front of her. I smiled.

"I can't believe this," Tak grumbled as I collected our trash on the tray. "We're going to have to pump her stomach when we get back to the base. Not to mention you've probably got her addicted now; she'll lose her mind craving this rubbish, and—"

"_Tak_?" Suddenly, we both heard her name out of nowhere, an incredulous question mark appended to its end. Well, not out of nowhere, exactly – from the mouth of one of two women who had appeared beside our table, gaping down at her. "Is that you?"

She glanced up at them, apparently as confused as I was. "Uh—yes?"

"It's me, Zita!" said the one with the bright purple hair, gesturing between herself and the other, taller woman with her. "Zita and Sarah! From Miss Bitters' class! You remember us, right?"

"Oh. Yes. Um, right." She flashed them an intensely disingenuous, uncomfortable smile, and I muffled a snort in my hand. "Lovely to see you again."

"We thought you were dead!" blurted Sarah. "I mean, you just disappeared one day! Dib said you got hit by a bus!"

The snort turned into a full-on snicker, leaking out from between my fingers. Tak curled her lip. "Did he really?"

"Yup," Zita confirmed cheerfully. "But I guess you didn't, huh? Crazy old Dib."

"Well," I put in, "what _really_ happened was, Dib was hitting on her like crazy, and he was so creepy she actually had to switch schools to get away from him. But of course, he didn't want anyone to know _that—_so he made up that story about the bus."

"Yeah, that sounds like Dib," Sarah sighed, shaking her head.

"Sure does," Zita agreed. "Well, congratulations on not being dead, anyway. How's your weenies?"

Tak buried her face in her hand and I answered for her, grinning. "Great, thanks for asking. Tak's dad retired a few years ago, so she's president of Deelishus Weenie now. We're actually in town this week to open up a new location. They're debuting her latest stroke of culinary genius – a triple-decker hotdog, sandwiched together with melted chocolate and nacho cheese, then dipped in batter and deep-fried. Sounds great, right?"

If looks were lasers, Tak wouldn't have needed to threaten me. "I wasn't kidding about leaving you here," she growled under her breath, glaring at me through the cracks between her fingers.

"Leaving me where?" I asked, feigning distress. "Leaving me here in town while you go back to Deelishus Weenie headquarters, and engineer the next generation of hotdog technology without me? I'd have no reason to _live_!"

Rising to her feet so abruptly that her knees smacked the table and jolted Vix's head up, Tak sent Zita and Sarah another grimacing smile. "Listen," she said, circling the table to grab Vix's sticky hand, "I'm sorry, but there's somewhere we've got to be. We'll catch up some other time."

"Bye!" Zita sang out as she and Sarah moved on, swinging their shopping bags. Tak stalked out of the food court with Vix in tow, her holographic heels clicking double-time, her crimson lips twitching with Irken obscenities. I rose to follow them and so did Mimi, slowly shaking her head.

Fortunately, a few hours of shopping either cooled Tak down or exhausted her will to be pissed – maybe both. At any rate, I didn't actively _try_ to make it painful for her. I just wanted to burn Earth into Vix's head before Tak burned it into ash. Wanted her to be able to remember it the way it had been, for better or for worse, when it was nothing but barracks and factories.

When she was grown up, and Tak had appointed her Minister of something or other, and she was a decorated veteran of battles waged across the universe and could chart the stars from the Plogg systems to the Skroosh nebula, I wanted her to remember the bright lights at the makeup counter in a department store.

So we made our rounds of the shops with their Muzak and mannequins, and she saw some things she'd never seen. Books. Earrings. Barbies. A poster for the upcoming release of the Game Slave 17. Vix alternately clung to my hand and wandered off to touch and taste and smell the new things she was seeing, many of which weren't actually supposed to be touched or tasted or smelled. Tak comforted herself with muttered reminders that she'd soon hear it all _crunch_ beneath her heel, and I sighed at how little anything had changed.

Near the point of doubling back and heading out, we ducked into a Hot Topic, when Vix decided to investigate the source of the softcore emo sludge leaking through the seam between its doors. She was staring up at the wall of glassed-in, square-folded T-shirts, contemplating the latest played-out-internet-meme-cum-hipster-gear-du-jour, when a woman with a tag on a lanyard reading "manager" stormed out of the back room.

"Hey!" she snapped at Tak and I, jabbing an inch-long black fingernail in Mimi's direction. "You can't have that cat in here. You're going to have to leave."

"Hey, maybe she's a seeing-eye cat," I sniped back. "Ever think of that?"

"Look, I don't care—" She paused halfway through her sentence, her heavily made-up eyes narrowing, then growing wide. I think it dawned on me about the same time as it did her, though she was the first one to voice it. "Gaz?"

"Zara! I can't believe I didn't realize it was you!"

Overjoyed less to have run into her and more to have run into her _like this_ – all that makeup hadn't done much to help her age gracefully, and she'd put on more than a few pounds under her tutu – I snaked an arm around Tak's waist and pulled to my side, knowing without looking that she was rolling her hologram's sexy eyes. "You look so…different."

"Yes—well—umm—" She reached down to adjust her Hot Topic T-shirt – still too-tight, like she'd always liked her clothes, but this time there was more than cleavage threatening to pop out. "It's been a long time."

"Sixteen years. What've you been up to since high school?"

"Oh—you know." She sort of winced at the store around her, as if she wished I didn't. Scratching her head, she added, "Uh, how about you?"

"Well, Tak and I own our own business now. It's actually been pretty successful – we're launching a big new project in a few days. I'm sure you'll hear about it." I glanced up at Tak to see her hologram's characteristic smirk curling its red lips. Apparently, she liked this cover story better than the Deelishus Weenie one. "This is Tak, by the way. My girlfriend."

That, she liked considerably less (her, every time I said it: _girlfriend. What a stupid, strengthless term. It's as if you _want _me to sound ridiculous: 'Almighty Tallest Tak, ruler of the Irken Empire, conqueror of a thousand worlds, and a human child's _girlfriend_'? _Me, in response: _well, I'm not going to introduce you to people as the conqueror of a thousand worlds, so unless you wanna get married, 'girlfriend' it is_)_. _

Still, she managed a disdainful smile, and a halfhearted "Lovely to meet you."

I watched Zara's eyes as she took her in, from her mile-long thigh boots to her ice-cream-cone keyhole, and made no effort to hide my grin. If there's anything more fun than bumping into an old flame when your new one is burning hotter, I have yet to encounter it. "Your…girlfriend?"

"My _soulmate_," I gushed, squeezing Tak with the arm around her waist, reveling in my ability to disgust her (if there was a word more 'strengthless' than _girlfriend_, it had to be _soulmate_) and wound Zara at the same time. "We've been together sixteen years."

Zara's brow knit as she processed that. "Sixteen years? But then—that means—"

"Yeah, I rebound fast. It's a gift."

Before Zara could open her mouth to respond, a _crash_ rang out through the store as a shelf of makeup, aided by the ungentle exploration of little hybrid hands, slipped off its brackets and toppled to the floor. Dodging the avalanche of Slashed-Wrists Red lipstick and Blackest Soul nail polish, Vix skittered sheepishly over to us, Mimi prancing along at her side.

"Well, I'd love to keep talking," I said innocently to Zara, "but you should probably clean that up."

"What? You—"

"See you around, Zara!" I chirped as I slid my arm around Tak's shoulders, and we headed back out into the mall.

On our way out, I fell back a few steps and watched Tak and Vix walking hand-in-hand, Mimi keeping dainty stride with them. I watched Vix's pigtails bobbing, and Tak's hair swinging in time with her steps, and their white, four-fingered hands intertwining in the space between them. For a moment, I imagined that our lives were exactly what they seemed.

I imagined that I was a normal human woman with a normal human girlfriend and a normal human daughter, with no greater ambition than to run a business and maintain a household. That we were going to belt ourselves into our car and sail down the highway to our house, where I would order pizza, Tak would scrape out Mimi's litter box, we'd put Vix to bed in her room and then curl up in ours, the stars no more than a string of lights decorating our window.

But that would be _boring_, wouldn't it?

When we were nearly at the revolving door, I grabbed Tak by her sleeve and pulled her into a drugstore, the last shop in the wing. Tugging her down the School Supplies aisle, I slid a little yellow-and-purple package off its peg, and held it up for her inspection. "See?" I said, with the pride of legitimacy at last achieved. "Sticky Tack."

She rolled her eyes.


	33. Unusual Circumstances

**32. Unusual Circumstances**

Tak beamed back up to the Massive after our first day on Earth, to "oversee the operation" while Vix and I had our little vacation. While she prepped the teleporters for mass depopulation, and toured the temporary colonies on the surrounding planets, and composed her Address For the Assimilation of Earth, we got front-row seats to Earth's farewell concert.

In a cloaked cruiser I'd borrowed from the prep crew, we saw the world in the time it'd take an airliner to fly to Australia. We bought hot pretzels from a street vendor in New York, and ate them sitting on the lions in Trafalgar Square; Vix's reflection followed her from the canals of Venice to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

I walked beside her as she hopscotched the battlements on the Great Wall of China, scrambling back up on her spider-legs when she slipped. We stood on the banks of the Nile and the Ganges, and when our fingers were frostbitten from feeding penguins, we swayed through the desert on a camel.

We strolled smoky alleys and sun-baked roads crunching eggrolls, ripping chunks off yard-long baguettes, sucking down skewers of souvlaki. In the jungle, we picked and sliced whatever fruits hung in our path, and when we came across a hive we stun-gunned the bees and scooped out their honey. Our souvenirs were numerous and diverse, some purchased for crisp stacks of bills in perfumed galleries, others for a handful of coins at a street stall.

All of it, we did as if attending the last run of a show, or the last week of an exhibit at a museum. We didn't watch the Northern Lights and philosophize about beauty and morality, or wander through Mayan ruins weeping over the transience of life; whatever we saw, we saw it well aware that it would soon be nothing but dust on a factory floor. And so what if it was? Progress is progress, and in two days, the progress of the Irken Empire would be steamrolling over the heritage of the human race.

And who's to say it was worth any more than anyone else's? Were the flowers in the Amazon any different from the leaves on the anglerfish trees? Did peacocks and tigers deserve to live any more than Glarpenoid bugs? Did the kings and chiefs and president men of Earth deserve to see their wills done any more than Tak did – or for that matter, more than the leaders of a hundred races already rubbed out like a stain under a licked thumb?

For seven billion people, the end of the Earth would be the end of the universe, but to us it was business as usual. We were a corporation, and we were buying them out.

It was good to know I didn't have _that_ much of a conscience, after all.

Of course, all of that globetrotting left Vix wiped out, so the morning of the third day found her snoozing and me contemplating my free time. Not that there was much contemplation to be done. Of everything we'd seen, everywhere we'd gone, and all the crumbs we'd licked off our fingers, there was one human comfort I'd longed for above any of it: water.

And not the water in the Ganges or the Nile, or the water that slid in beads down rainforest vines. The water that swirled through pipes dug up and diverted by the prep crew, filling a repurposed lab tank, warming under the beam of a dialed-down laser—the water in which I'd take my first bath in sixteen years. A long, glorious bath, as hot as I could get it without boiling myself alive. No particles or frequencies, just me naked under rolling hills of bubbles, zoning out until my toes puckered into prunes.

I figured hey, why not? There was nothing else I had to do. Vix was asleep, my obligations were fulfilled, and the prep crew was busy doing what they had to do to grease the wheels of Tak's plans. Until it was time to pack up and get the hell out of Dodge, I was free to do as I pleased.

"Comm—uhh, Gaz!" I startled to the sound of Rel rapping on the door. "Tallest Tak wants to speak with you!"

_Fuck. _"Just come in," I groaned, sinking down in my makeshift tub.

The doors opened and Rel skittered in, clutching a tablet. She wasn't officially part of the prep crew, but she was still fascinated by aliens and their worlds, and she had begged to be allowed to come down and help out just to get a glimpse of Earth from the windows of the temporary base. "Sorry to interrupt you," she said sheepishly, "but Tallest Tak is on the line, and she says she has an assignment for you."

"An _assignment_? Are you kidding me?"

"Ahh…no, I'm afraid not." She stood there awkwardly a moment, blinking at me. "Um, so you should probably—"

"I'm not getting out. Bring her in here."

There were transmission screens in near every room of any Irken structure, and the temporary base was no different. Nodding, Rel went to a control panel on the wall and pushed a couple of buttons. A second later, two panels in the wall facing my bathtub slid apart, to reveal a screen on which Tak's image flickered into focus.

"Where on Irk are you, child?" she demanded when she saw me, furrowing her brow.

"Not Irk, Sticky. I'm on Earth, remember?" I raised my eyebrows. "And I'm in the bathtub, where does it look like?"

She frowned. "So this is how you address your Tallest when she's on the verge of conquering Earth? In the _bathtub_?"

"No, this is how I address my girlfriend when she's being a royal pain in the ass. What do you want, anyway?"

Sighing, she glanced down at the console beneath her transmission screen, and her fingers moved quickly across the control panel. "We've just run the pre-depopulation planetwide bioscan for alien life forms. I sent my agents to eliminate Zim and liquidate his base before I left Earth, so I expected it would come up clean."

A second window blipped onto the lower left corner of the screen, displaying a gridded model of the Earth from where Tak would've been seeing it. My eyes went immediately to a blinking red dot, hovering suspiciously near my hometown. "As you can see," she said grimly, "it didn't."

"So send someone to take care of it," I said, stirring a clump of bubbles floating near me. "Isn't that what you always do?"

"These are unusual circumstances. The biosignal is only strong enough to trace to somewhere within a five-mile radius of your city – I can't pin it down." She shook her head slowly. "None of this makes any sense. There's no reason for an alien life form other than Zim to be hiding out on Earth, and there's certainly no reason for _any_ biosignal to be this fuzzy. I can't even get a clear read on its species."

I heaved a sigh. "So what do you want me to do about it?"

"I want you to find it and deal with it. You know the city better than anyone on the prep crew, so you'll know where to look. Take some backup and a short-range bioscanner and make sure that this _thing_, whatever it is, is gone in twenty-four hours."

_Well, so much for my relaxation time. _My back squelched against the tank as I slid further down into the warm water, grumbling into the bubbles. "Do I have to?"

"Yes, you _have_ to! If an alien life form is still on Earth when we activate the teleporters, the bioselection mechanism will glitch, and it'll ruin _everything_! I am _not _letting all the work I've done go to waste because _you're _too lazy to get out of the bathtub!"

"Fine, fine. God. The shit I put up with for you." I slipped beneath the water for one last dunk, blowing a column of bubbles from my nose, and rose with my skin glistening and my hair slicked back. "You know what's the worst part of your being a scaly demon from beyond the stars?"

She rolled her eyes. "Enlighten me."

"Unless you're severely masochistic, I'll never get to fuck you in the shower."

Tak stared at me a moment, narrow-eyed, unamused. "Just find that thing," she snapped, and cut the transmission.

Stepping out of the tub with a slosh and a shiver, I wrapped myself in my towel and padded over to the doors, my wet footsteps squish-slapping into the corridor. "Get a cruiser ready," I said to Rel, who stood waiting for me outside the doors. "We're going on a little adventure."

Tak was definitely right about one thing: I knew the city better than any of these little green nubs, and I knew exactly where to look. I couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it herself. I'd already encountered an alien life form hiding out within a five-mile radius of the city, when her pet robot swiped my Game Slave sixteen years ago. And if she'd decided the industrial district was the safest place to squat, no doubt the owner of the fuzzy signal had, too.

So Rel and I cruised out to the place where manufacturers' dreams went to die. Sixteen years hadn't convinced anyone to sink any money into it, and it remained a graveyard of moldering bricks and rusted machinery. Little, save for a few more walls caved in and a few more signs toppled by storms, had changed since Tak had climbed into the car with me.

As ever, the dust and dirt hung so thick in the air as to block out the sun, sealing the district in a timeless bubble. As ever, it was silent, but for the slow _plink_ of runoff dripping into the sewers.

We parked the cruiser with its cloaker on and set out walking down the main drag, me with my eyes and ears peeled, Rel sweeping the short-range bioscanner in slow arcs ahead of us. So as not to miss anything – or give ourselves away – neither of us spoke. The only sound was the soft crunch of rubble beneath our boots.

"I don't understand," Rel said after awhile, frowning down at the scanner's control panel. "I'm not getting anything. If the signal was coming from here, shouldn't we have picked it up by now?"

"Well, what did you set it to? Non-human life forms? There must be a million rats and bugs and birds skulking around this shit heap; maybe it's confused."

"It can't be. I set it to lock onto extraterrestrial biosignals." She blinked up at me uncertainly. "Maybe we should look somewhere else."

I looked up at the road stretching out ahead of us, bordered by dunes of crumbling concrete blocks, crisscrossed by collapsed street lights and signposts. On either side, the shadows of buildings loomed, and the breeze that blew through their shattered windows spoke to me.

"Let's at least cover all of the main drag," I said, my instincts tugging me forward. "I have a hunch about this."

We'd nearly reached the end of the main drag – could see the cul-de-sac that was the road's terminus, and the faded yellow Dead End sign on a post wilted to a right angle – when the bioscanner let out an encouraging _pipip_, and I saw a flicker of red on its screen.

"That's strange," Rel said, her brow knit as she stared down at the scanner, waiting for the signal to appear again. "Where did it go?"

Unlike most biosignals, this one didn't stick once it registered. It faded in and out, like the image on a TV when you fiddle with the rabbit ears. Before it blipped out the second time, we managed to trace it to a warehouse near the cul-de-sac, so dilapidated I couldn't even read the letters painted on one long side.

"Well, at least we've got something," I said. "Let's go check it out."

We went in through a gaping hole in one of the warehouse's walls, a few lonely bricks jutting out like the teeth in a jack-o'-lantern's grin. Our footsteps echoed as we moved through the spaces between racks, rows upon rows of them, rusting metal grids so tall they nearly reached the ceiling; once upon a time, they'd have been stacked with crates, but now we could look through them to either end of the warehouse. The signal sputtered on the bioscanner's screen. Nothing, save a pigeon taking flight through a cracked skylight, moved.

Suddenly, I heard a muffled _crash _from the other side of the room, as if someone had banged open a door a few walls away. "Sounds like it came from the back rooms," I said to Rel, picking up my pace. "Come on."

I opened a door at the back of the warehouse and headed down a dark, narrow corridor, finding my way by the glow of a pak-mounted light. Almost at the end, one of the doors door hung half-open, its wood peeling, its hinges shrieking when I grabbed the knob and stepped into the room.

A long triangle of light spilled over my shoulder, illuminating the abandoned office in sections: the wall ahead of me, and when I turned, the corner to my right. Then, the corner to my left.

"_Shit._"

The thing in the left corner hissed at me when the light fell over it, baring a mouth full of almost-fangs. It crouched on the ground as if it were an animal, poised to pounce, arching its back like a cat would raise its hackles.

Its limbs were long and skinny, legs folded underneath it, arms splayed out in front of it; it had two fingers and a thumb on each hand, their claws digging into the carpet. It was naked and it was the color of milk, so pale it glowed in the light—glowed like sun through a chain-link fence, the white of its skin latticed by a web of angry dark scars.

_It. _No, that wasn't right; the thing had to be female, because there were spirals at the ends of its antennae. The left was half-cocked, quivering, and the right hung strangely limp from her head, near-indistinguishable from her snarls of black hair. Her left eye was sewn shut, the lid stretched over something smooth and unmoving. The right glared up at me, bright with terror unfiltered by a pupil or an iris. Blood-red.

"Shit. _Shit._ What the fuck is this?"

I jerked my head towards Rel's silhouette in the doorway, as if she could answer the question any better than I could. She shrugged helplessly and I turned back to the thing in the corner, still hissing, lips pulled back over her teeth. "What the hell are y—aAH! Shit!"

No sooner did I take a step closer than the thing lashed out at me, spitting and snarling, swiping her claws through the air an inch from my legs. I jumped back, whipped a stun gun out of my pak, and caught her with the full force of the beam; instantly, her spindly limbs buckled beneath her. She collapsed face-down on the floor.

"Go back and get the cruiser," I instructed Rel. "And bring me a preservation capsule. We're taking this thing back to the base."

She took off and I knelt beside the crumpled, curled-up creature, drawing shallow breaths through a mouth half-squashed into the carpet. I carded a hand into her hair, pushing it back from her face and rolling her over onto her back (noticing, in the process, a number tattooed on the nape of her neck: J499-62A) to get a good look at her.

"No wonder the scanner was having trouble with you," I muttered. "You're only half an alien life form."

I didn't have to unravel her DNA to know what she was. To recognize what Vix could've been, if Tak had taken her in a different direction. What I didn't know were the whys of her: why she was numbered. Why she was scarred. Why she was here, in the industrial district, and why she existed at all.

Why anyone would make something like her (because something like her _had_ to be made, deliberately; because a human-Irken hybrid doesn't happen by accident, because of a broken condom or a missed pill) only to twist it beyond recognition, into a beast that moved on all fours and spoke in growls.

I also didn't have to test her Irken genes to know where they'd come from. I was already too well-acquainted with the only Irken who'd been on Earth long enough to bake a cookie like this. What I didn't know – what I was afraid to know, what tempted me to euthanize her while she slept and swear Rel to secrecy – was who'd given her her moon-white skin, and her tangles of long black hair.

"Shit," I sighed for the jillionth time, shoving my hand through my hair. "Whatever you are, it's not good."


	34. Unraveling

I'm thrilled to see the positive response to my loop-de-looping curveball – to be honest, I was afraid this might be the point at which people would say "okay, this is getting too ridiculous, I'm done." I like this OC and I'm excited about the story/backstory I have planned for her, so hopefully it'll live up to expectations.

**33. Unraveling**

We took the thing back to the base curled knees-to-nose in a preservation capsule, sucking air spiked with sedative gas from its built-in respirator. From there, it was easy enough to dump her into an examination tank, where she floated in a reservoir of pale green liquid.

Like the fluid that had sustained Vix before she was "born", it would keep her asleep and the blood moving through her veins, until I decided what to do with her. Like Vix's gestation tank, the examination tank had a glass wall before which I sat, in a scoop chair pulled up to a console.

"Go call Tak for me, would you?" I said to Rel, who stood waiting for my word beside the doors. "Tell her we took care of her problem and I'll explain later. Don't tell her—don't tell _anyone_—about this—" I waved my hand in the direction of the tank "—_thing_."

"Yes, C—Gaz," she said, nodding, and left.

I leaned back in the chair to look at the thing in the tank, hanging there long and limp and white like a bean sprout. Upright, she was a good half-foot shorter than Tak was, but her body was cast in Tak's mold: skinny, almost spidery, sharp and angular where humans were soft and curved.

My eyes, traveling over her, unconsciously followed the lines of her scars, or at least those that took the form of lines. Some were suture-scars, zigzagged with black stitches, but others were shapeless swathes of dark, dead tissue. Burns, I thought, though from what I couldn't tell.

A full-system scan revealed that near everything inside her (most of it reflective of her Irken genes, if not Irken per se; like Vix's, her biology couldn't be shoved into boxes, neatly divided and defined) had been at some point dissected, the scars echoes of where tongs and scalpels had been plunged into her like kids bobbing for apples in a barrel.

She had all the parts she should've had, but a lot of them weren't working. I saw bones pulled out and put back at the wrong angles, organs sliced open and sewn up the wrong way, blood flowering where tissue had been sampled from the wrong places. The words _living autopsy_ came to mind.

She still had her left eye, but it lay like a marble in the sealed socket, its nerves severed. Her right antenna hung limp because it had been cut off near the base, and clumsily reattached; it was _there_, but it wouldn't _do_ anything. Whoever had sutured it to its root obviously had no idea how it worked.

Her digestive system was littered with the evidence of a scavenger's diet: the torn skin and chipped bones of the rats that pattered down the alleyways of the industrial district, traces of the chemicals that soured the water running through the sewers. The computer, scraping together what clues her body offered, guessed that she was between fifteen and twenty years old.

Her hair fanned out in the fluid, a thicket of black knots that tumbled to her tailbone; I figured it had never been brushed or cut. Rolling a joystick in my fist, I extended a metal arm inside the tank to push her hair over one shoulder and turn her around. With the number on the back of her neck exposed, I could hit a button on the console and scan it, in hopes that it was encoded with something that would help me figure her out.

A window blipped onto the control panel on the console, displaying three lines of green text on a black screen:

_Specimen J499-62A_

_Property of the East End Paranormal Research Facility_

_Tel: 121-907-3314_

So she was tagged. Like a dog. Clearly, these East End people were hoping whoever found her would call that number and turn her in, but I had something different in mind.

I entered a few strings of code into the computer, and a pair of electrodes dropped into the liquid and attached themselves to her temples. A panel on the console retracted, presenting me with a virtual reality headset: a slick purple arc, like a melon rind, with a black lens spanning the inside, and padded speakers at either end. On the control panel, the words _initiate brain tap?_ blinked, awaiting my answer. I tapped the _yes_ icon and slid the goggles into place over my eyes, fitting the speakers over my ears.

_"What _is_ it?"_

_In my first memory, I am small, and the world around me is cold and hard. The air is cold and hard, antiseptic, sharp-edged. The surface beneath me is cold and hard, so cold it sticks to the soft new skin of my back, so hard it sent whispercracks through my bones (bones like birds' bones, like balsawood) when they dropped me here. Fingers fan over me, pushing their pads into my belly, my legs, my neck, and they are cold and hard enough to bruise. _

_"It's the discovery of the millennium, that's what it is." I can hear voices, but I can't see where they come from; all I can see is a circle of white above me, fading into fuzzy black edges. "Look at this. Just _look_ at it. Have you ever seen anything like this?"_

_"Is it…an alien?"_

_"Well, it isn't human."_

_"It looks like a baby."_

_"More like a larva."_

_"All the better. We'll get to observe it from the beginning of its life cycle."_

_"And you just—_found_ it? Just like that?"_

_"Listen, I know how it sounds, but it's true. I heard it crying and I pulled over and there it was, lying on the ground in an alleyway near Krazy Taco. Truth is stranger than fiction, right?"_

_"Who do you suppose left it there?"_

_"It doesn't matter. It belongs to us now." I open my mouth to yawn and a fat, warm fingertip slides in, pushing my lip up as if to inspect my tongue, my gums, my rows of tiny teeth. A blurry dark shape halves the white disc above me, and after a moment, the finger withdraws. "Imagine the possibilities. The _opportunities_."_

_"Are we going to call a conference?"_

_"No. Not yet. It's too soon to go public, too dangerous. We have a lot of work to do first."_

_I feel a pair of hands slip beneath my head and legs, lifting me away from the coldness and hardness and placing me into a pair of waiting arms. They curl around me, pull me close; my world becomes the cool crispness of a lab coat, the squeak and squelch of rubber gloves. _

_"Take it to a sterile isolation chamber. We don't want somebody's hay fever robbing us of our chance to make the greatest parascientific breakthrough the world's ever seen."_

_"Wing A?"_

_"Wing A will be fine, yes. And begin preparing a profile for it. I want to get started as soon as possible."_

Lacking the time to sit and pore over the full catalogue of the thing's memories, I felt for the button on the headset that would speed the flow of the feedback, watching as images of a long, tiled hallway and a wall lined with circular hatches flashed quickly by. A tiny white capsule of a room, bright lights in the ceiling, a little glass window in the hatch, limp rubber gloves protruding from beneath it. Dry air piped in through a vent. A camera's round black eye. A thousand pinpricks and prodding fingers and cold stripes of measuring tape tightened around bare skin, the whirr and click of the X-ray machine.

_Again, I lie on a cold, hard surface, a table in the center of a lab. I'm a little bit bigger now, but not much. All around me, in lab coats and rubber gloves, are humans. _

_I know what a human is now: a tall, pale-skinned creature with hair growing like a crop from the earth of its scalp, with white watery eyes and darting black pupils, with the fleshy bulge called a nose in the center of its face. Human voices are the voices that surround me, and human hands are the hands that leave watercolor blotches, purple and blue, on my skin. _

_I lie on the table with my ankles and wrists strapped down, spread-eagle. A human stands over me, staring at me, holding a small silver rectangle close to his lips. "Having compiled an exhaustive biological profile of specimen J499-62A," he says to the rectangle, "based on external examinations and a series of internal scans, we proceed to phase two of our research: internal examination."_

_He hands the rectangle to another human standing near him, her hair and coat wrapped in crinkly pale blue paper, her mouth and nose hidden behind a white mask. He takes a mask for himself and stretches its band around his head, then turns to a third human, demanding, "Scalpel."_

_The thing she hands him is sharp and silver, glistening in the light. He comes close and brings it down, down, until I can't see it anymore; I think it's disappeared, for a moment, before I feel it bite my skin. I feel its edge pierce me neatly, feel it slide in a smooth, clean line down my belly, opening me up. _

_It is the first real pain I ever know. It burns, it _burns_, like fire, so hot I'm dizzy and I squeeze my eyes shut and I'm not sure what the wail in the air is, the choking whimpering cry, until I feel it scrape my throat on the way up. _

_"Keep it quiet," the man with the scalpel snaps at one of the other humans. "I can't work with this racket in my ears."_

_"Can't we just knock it out?"_

_"No. We have no idea what effect a sedative would have on its body. We still have humans dying under anesthetic, however rarely; we can't take the chance of administering it to an alien life form." _

_He presses his gloved fingers into the hot line across my belly, pulling it open, peeling back the skin and securing it with cold clamps. I hear myself screaming and screaming, jerking against the straps. "_Silence it_," he hisses._

_Hands and arms descend from behind me and cocoon my mouth and my face, swaddling my head in layers of lab coat and rubber gloves. They are thick and heavy and when I scream into them, it dies quickly, becomes a wet warm stain crumpling into my open mouth. _

_Still, I can't stop. As the man pushes his hands into me, as the pain threatens to blind me, I shriek and howl and kick and squirm. I feel something wet burn my eyes like his hands burn my insides, and taste blood in my mouth like I see it trickle in a river down my side, staining the butcher paper on the lab table, dripping down to the tile floor._

_"As evinced by preliminary scans," the man says to the rectangle, held up by the second human, "specimen J499-62A's physiological systems revolve around several unidentifiable organs, the workings and purposes of which we hope to discover through vivisection. On the left side of its abdomen, beneath the skeletal structure we believe to be analogous to a human rib cage, we find an organ of most unusual composition: similar neither in shape nor texture to any human organ, and an interesting shade of dark blue."_

_I feel the scalpel again, cutting into something soft inside me. Warmth spreads through my body. My breath emerges in a strangled heave. Briefly, I black out. Or at least I must, because the next thing I know the man is speaking again, and I didn't hear him begin. _

_"…endeavor not to permanently alter any of the specimen's biological material, that it might be presented to the public in as close a state as possible to that in which it would exist naturally. Ideally, all vivisection will occur without removal of or irreparable damage to the organ in question, posing a difficult…"_

_I fade in and out, convulsing, my head swimming. They feed me with a drip in my chamber, so when the nausea grips me all I spit up is a sticky clear liquid, into the gloves and coatsleeves and my own face. I swallow it and I swallow my tears, running down my cheeks into my mouth. _

_"Fascinating," the man says when he looks up. "Despite the distinctly nonhuman nature of its eyes, the specimen is capable of producing a substance similar in appearance to tears." He nods at someone behind me. "Bring a vial and take a sample. We'll want to test that." _

_Seconds later, I feel the cool rim of a vial pressed beneath my right eye, and fingers forcing open its lids._

Fuck. Even if I'd had the time, I couldn't have made myself watch all of this. Another flip of the fast-forward switch flooded the lens with a hundred scenes like the one I'd just watched—lived. I saw the scars as they were etched, and the blows as they were struck. I saw her taken apart and put back together wrong. I saw the doctors murmuring through their masks into the tape recorder, the scalpel shining under the huge, round lights above the table; I smelled blood and vomit and viscera, and felt the needle flashing in and out of her skin. I felt the pain as it moved in and made a home of her, a lead cloak, a faithful friend.

_Today is a dry-testing day. _

_I know because when they bring me to the lab, before they lay me down on the table and all I can see are the bright lights, I catch a glimpse of the tools lined up on the cart beside it. Syringes of all sizes, droppers with black bulbs, little glass jars with paper labels taped to their lids. _

_Today there will be no scalpel, no needle. Those are for wet-testing, for when they go inside me, and today is a dry-testing day._

_They lay me out on the table and tighten the straps around my ankles and wrists. They have a muzzle for me now: a hard plastic bit they slide into my mouth, straps they buckle snugly at the back of my head, and a key on the flat side of the bit that locks the whole thing in place once turned. It's been sterilized since yesterday, a wet-testing day. The bit tastes of antiseptic; the film of blood and spit-up has been rinsed away. _

_It's not so bad, at first. I hear the _pop _of an uncapped marker, then feel it squelch, cool and slick, over my skin. The scent of the solvent, like rubbing alcohol, fills the air. A few seconds later, I feel a pinprick in the same place I felt the marker, halfway down my thigh. Compared to the scalpel, it doesn't hurt. _

_A few more pinpricks in a few other places – my belly, my hip, the soft upper part of my arm, all preceded by the tickly touch of the marker – and I'm still okay. I don't cry. I don't fight. I listen to the scritch of a pen on paper, in between each shot. This is how it always goes, on dry-testing days._

_Always, I think I'll be all right, until they lay down the syringes and pick up the droppers. Until the next squelch of the marker summons a burst of bright, bubbling pain, on the right side of my abdomen – a few inches down from the shiny, stretched-tight skin from a dry-testing day a long time ago, when a lighter lay next to the droppers on the cart. _

_Like I did then, I scream. I scream into the muzzle and the pen scritches on the paper and it feels as if something is eating its way through to my other side, twisting like a knife._

_The pain comes in raindrops, falling here and there in between swipes of the marker and scribbles of the pen. It's a little bit different every time. Sometimes it burns, sometimes it stings, sometimes it stabs. Sometimes I feel my skin crackle and curl; sometimes there's blood, wet, sticky, metallic. Always I scream, and struggle, and sob. This is how it always goes, on dry-testing days. _

_The humans who bring the pain do not speak, but through glazed eyes I see a woman in a lab coat standing over me, lifting the tape recorder to her mouth. _

_"It is interesting to note," she tells it, "that although specimen J499-62A has been in our care for three years, during which time it has developed physically more quickly than a human of comparable age, its mental development appears grossly lacking. It neither speaks, walks, nor attempts any semblance of either; it neither employs nor seems to understand any form of communication, spoken or otherwise."_

_She circles me slowly, tapping the tape recorder against her chin. "One wonders if this is owed to the circumstances under which it has developed," she continues, "or if it is simply a lower life form. Perhaps a member of an unintelligent – even non-sentient – species."_

Years went by before my eyes, their passing marked only by her body growing older and her jungle of scars growing thicker. Every time I lifted my finger from the forward button, a new knot of pain throbbed inside her, another lipstick stain from the scalpel's kiss; a new line of stitches, like black zippers, decorated her skin. They pulled her teeth and put them on microscope slides, still wet with blood. They force-fed her through a medical gag, held her head over a lab sink, and wrote down what she threw up.

_I sit in my chamber, thighs strapped to the floor, upper arms to the wall. It used to be that I was free inside my chamber, and I would curl up in the corner when they brought me back from the lab. Now, they strap me down so I won't disturb the tubes, snaking out of the walls and into me. _

_It used to be just my drip, but now I live in a forest of wires and tubes, taped to my arms and chest and neck. Plus my respirator, which is like the muzzle, except that it makes it easier to breathe instead of hard._

_From outside, in the hallway, I can hear a rhythmic beep…beep…beep. It's always there. Ever since they hooked me up to the tubes, it's been there, and sometimes I hear the humans' footsteps slow when they approach it. Click-click-click-click…click…click…click-click-click-click. It lulls me to sleep, the beeping, and so does the sound of the respirator – the soft hhh-huhh of each breath._

_But it isn't time for sleep. Now, it's time to go to the lab, for dry- or wet-testing I don't know; a human unlocks the door, undoes my straps, pulls out the tubes and scoops me up under my arms, carrying me out into the hall. I'm too big for them to carry me to the lab now, so he straps me onto a stretcher, its wheels clickclickclicking faster than any footsteps as they roll over the tile floor._

_In the lab, the first thing I see is a scalpel, glittering on the cart beside the table. Wet-testing. There is the scalpel to open me, but today, there is no needle or thread to close me up; in their place lies a roll of tape, and a short length of gauze. When they strap me down, they don't put on the muzzle. _

_I blink with the eye that still sees, not understanding. A pair of shadows loom above me, leaning towards each other, like an arch without a keystone._

_"Are you sure this is safe?" says one human to the other. "What if we can't reattach it? Remember what happened with its eye."_

_"I do, and we learned from that. We won't make the same mistakes this time. We'll study it and then we'll restore it to full function, no problem."_

_"I'm just saying, __I'm__ not going to be the one who tells Callum we'll be presenting this thing with a missing eye _and_ a fucked-up antenna."_ _The first_ _human snorts. "If we present it at all. Can you believe Callum's been stalling for five years now? I don't even think he __wants__ to go public – he's just going to hoard this thing forever."_

_"He says we still need to do more research. If we go public before we understand it fully, we'll be chewed up and spit out halfway through our first press conference."_

_"Bullshit. He's paranoid. He's scared to let anyone else get their hands on his baby, so we're all just going to shut up and take it while the rest of the scientific community smirks at our entire field."_

_"Well, can you really blame him? He's sitting on a pretty incredible egg here. If I were him, I wouldn't want to get up, either." I feel gloved fingers sliding down one of my antennae, gently, slowly. It's the first thing that's felt good—almost good—in a long time. "Look at this. There's nothing on Earth like this, not on anything bigger than your thumb." _

_The shadows disappear and I feel new hands on my right antenna, stroking it once, then pulling it tight. One fist holds it still at the root, one just below the spiral. The second voice comes again, this time speaking like they always speak when they're addressing the tape recorder._

_"Having been in our care for five years, Specimen J499-62A appears to have achieved a level of physical maturity equivalent to that of a human of approximately nine years old. The recent cease in growth of its sensory appendages leads us to believe that they have reached their adult length. Thus, this seems an opportune time for amputation and dissection, with the goal of rebuilding and restoring the appendage once all relevant data has been collected."_

_A second passes in silence. Then, I feel a sharp pain in my right antenna, and a weak cry burbles in my throat. I recognize the edge of the scalpel, my old friend, as it severs my antenna in one smooth _shlick_._

_All the blood in my body seems to rush to my head, like I'm hanging upside-down. It swirls into my skull and fills the root of my antenna, suddenly gone much lighter—I feel it burning, and something wet running through my hair. I smell copper, but faintly, as if the source is distant. It takes me a moment to realize I'm only sensing it with one antenna. _

I'd marathoned my share of horror flicks in my time, but there was only so much gloom and doom I could take. Throwing in the towel after the episode with the antenna – and I didn't even _have_ antennae, it was just thinking about Tak, and how she'd practically killed me when I'd untangled hers that time, and my mouth soured at the thought of slicing one clean through, like a fucking stalk of rhubarb – I fast-forwarded through everything else, just wanting to know how she'd gotten from East End to the industrial district. Sweet cyborg Christ. One hellhole to another.

_There are a lot of little coincidences that lead to my escape._

_Things like my straps being worn, the rivets that hold them to the wall coming loose, so that once one comes unscrewed, I can undo the others. Like it being one of my good days, so I'm not shaking too bad to peel back the tape and unstick the tubes, so that my fingers on my right hand (which don't always do what I tell them to, ever since the humans cut them open and sewed them back up) work long enough to unbuckle the respirator. So that I'm strong enough to pull myself up on the door handle, even if it takes me a long time, and my knees swivel inwards when I do. _

_Things like whoever watches me through the camera not paying much attention, so the humans don't come click-click-clicking down the hall as soon as I'm up on my feet. Like whoever locks my chamber door forgetting to this time, so that it swings open a little when I lean on it—so that I can see at first a sliver of hallway, then a triangle, then a wide white arc._

_Things like the corridor being empty when I stumble out into it, blinking around with my good eye. I try to walk, like the humans do, but I can't. My weight is too much for my legs and I crumple to the floor, and in my throat rises a lump of desire to crawl back into my chamber, to be safe, for a given value of safe. Yesterday was a wet-testing day and there's a big new scar bisecting my belly, a hot pulsing pain that tightens its grip when I move. That whispers to me, _stay.

_Things like me looking down at that scar, like railroad tracks traveling across my skin, and deciding I can't._

_Things like the hallway where my chamber is being only two corners from a door, with a bar across the center striped in black and yellow, and a big sign that says EMERGENCY EXIT above it. I get there slowly, on my hands and knees, having to drag myself when the pain crashes over me and I vomit a spatter of blood onto the white tile, shuddering—but I get there. I can't read the sign, but I get there. _

_Things like the wail of the alarm that erupts when I shove my weight against the door, telling me to run. When it speaks to me, I listen. I don't know much, but I know I have to run, even though it hurts—even though I don't know _how_ to run, I don't even know how to walk, and I tumble forward onto the hard ground when the door gives. _

_Things like the cold night air – my first fresh air in years – that hits me like a gunshot, makes me move. The wind that whips my hair and my antennae out behind me, makes my eye sting with tears. My run is an animal's run, a gallop; I cross the grounds in clumsy, loping strides, feet and palms scraping the dirt. I trip and slide and get up again, keep going, keep running, keep flinging my arms out in front of me, bunching and releasing my legs. _

_Things like the hole in the razor-wire fence surrounding the grounds. Like the floodlights that flicker on and show me where the wire frays, where I can peel it back and push myself through to the other side, adding rows of thin red scratches to my collection of scars. I'm panting and shaking, my head spinning, my vision darkening. Choking on fresh air and the unfamiliar smell of earth. I double over, clutching my middle, and when I pull my hand away it's smeared red; I look down and realize I've busted my stitches, see the blood streaming down my legs. _

_Things like the will, rising out of nothing, out of the grass and the dirt and the crescent moon, to run still._

_I might think there's someone watching over me, in the grass or the dirt or the crescent moon. That the world is on my side. Might, if it weren't that I'd been in that place seven years, and I have no idea where I'm going. _

I removed the headset slowly, and the _clack_ as I set it back down on the console seemed to fill the room. The electrodes returned to their ports.

I sunk down in the scoop chair and stared at the thing floating in the tank, this horrible broken thing destiny had dumped into my arms. _Destiny._ It had sounded so much better when I was waxing meaningful to Tak.

But I couldn't put it out of its misery, however miserable it was. I had an _obligation_ to it. Not just because it was a hybrid, and I owed Vix the chance to meet the only other member of her species. Because I had a feeling – call it a hunch, call it a suspicion, call it knowing that wherever there was trouble (moreover, wherever there was Zim) there was Dib – that this thing was her cousin.

But why leave it a feeling? Why not press a button and solidify it, into an ugly, clammy fact that would squat on my brain like a toad? My life had been too easy lately, anyway.

Sighing, I reached for the control panel and initiated a DNA scan, and sat there rubbing my eyes while it ran. When I heard the _ping_ announcing the results, not more than two minutes later, I peeked down at the screen with one eye, through a crack between my fingers.

"Fuck."

No avoiding it now. There it was, in black and white – well, black and white in one little window, on one side of the screen, and green and red on the other. This thing, _specimen J499-62A_, was the unholy spawn of my outcast freak brother and his outcast moron nemesis. I didn't know how or why (for fuck's sake, _why_?), but I knew one thing: I felt worse for it than ever now.


	35. Burning the Earth, Part II

THE PLOT, SHE HAS RETURNED.

Also, the next chapter will be very short, and thus will probably be up pretty quickly after this one. Just a heads-up.

**34. Burning the Earth, Part II**

When Dib showed up at the base on the last night, all I really wanted to do was grab him by the collar, smack him in the face, and scream, _why the FUCK do I have your traumatized half-Irken offspring floating in a tank in my closet?!_

Instead, I jerked my head towards the hall behind me, and said, "Hurry up. You're late."

There was no time to get answers now. If I got into it with him now, it'd slow down Tak's plans, and God forbid I should slow down Tak's plans. She was itching to give the order to fire up the teleporters, and the only thing left on her to-do list was liquidate the temporary base. Once we'd cleared the atmosphere, Earth's fate would be sealed.

So I swallowed the question, honking horse pill though it was, and turned to walk down the hall, motioning for Dib to follow. Outside, the temporary base was camouflaged to look like an ordinary house, sandwiched between two other ordinary houses on an ordinary block.

Inside, there was a short, wallpapered hallway, for the benefit of anyone who should stroll by while the front door was open, and at the end of that, another door. When we approached it, the knob retracted and it slid into the wall, opening onto the base's control center.

My footsteps _clack_ed to a stop in the center of the round, red-paneled room, and I glanced over my shoulder at Dib. He narrowed his eyes at my gown. "Well," he said, his attempt at snark fading into bitterness almost instantly, "don't you look like alien royalty?"

I sniffed. "I _am_ alien royalty, or at least I'm fucking it. What did you expect me to wear for this occasion? Jeans?"

"Oh, so taking over the Earth is an _occasion_ now."

"Hell yeah. It's a party." I spun around and socked him in the shoulder, harder than I would have were I just jerking his chain—hard enough to make sure I was understood. "So don't be a stick in the mud."

As he stood there glowering, rubbing his shoulder, I circled the room chatting with the prep crew at their stations, confirming that the hatches were battened and the anchors aweighed and we were ready to shove off for space-sea.

I yelled for Vix – who had holed up in a spare room with her souvenirs and a handful of imaginary friends, playing dress-up in a hanbok and an African mask – over the intercom and she came running, clomping down the corridor in a pair of wooden clogs. Dib deposited himself in a dish chair and said nothing to anyone, kindly sparing us all the displeasure of his company.

When the leader of the prep crew initiated the liquidation sequence, the roots of the base extracted themselves from the ground, slurping back into their ports like slush up the straw of a Suckmonkey. The structure streamlined itself, supplies folding into the walls of their pods, equipment folding into the walls of its lab, pods and labs folding into wings that swept down the base's sides.

The engines warmed. The cloaker flickered off. The walls vibrated around us, and we slipped the Earth and swooped into the sky; all that was left were a few muddy drag-marks, in the grass of an empty lot between two ordinary houses.

It didn't take us five minutes to meet the Massive, waiting for us outside the atmosphere. We rose up into the docking bay and clambered up onto the decks, where most of the crew dispersed quickly; they were no keener than I was to dawdle their way into a verbal (and possibly literal, depending on how much time she was willing to waste on it) thrashing from Tak. Dispatching Rel to take care of our little secret, I herded Vix, chattering to a kimekomi doll, and Dib, sulkingly silent, up onto the main deck.

"Mummy!" Vix shrieked when she saw Tak, conferring with a member of the crew. She dashed over and buried herself in her skirt, throwing her arms around Tak's legs, babbling.

"Guess what we did? We went all over the whole entire Earth! I got to pet a goat! Do you know what a goat is? I didn't, but I got to pet one! I bet you never petted a goat! You're going to be mad at Mommy, 'cause we ate lots of human food! I even almost threw up a couple of times! It was great! See my doll? I named her—"

"That sounds lovely, Vix," Tak cut her off with a sigh. "Really. Tell me about it some other time." Once she'd peeled Vix off of her, she turned her attention to Dib and I, eyes slit in a scowl. "What is _he _doing here?" she barked.

"You said he could come."

"I said you could _offer_," she growled. "I didn't think he'd accept. Have you no pride, Earth rat?" she addressed Dib, switching to English momentarily so he'd understand the insult.

Even so, he didn't answer. I shook my head. "Well, consider this a lesson. Don't promise anything you're not prepared to make good."

She glared at me. "_I'm_ not the one _making good_ on this, child. I told you that _you_ would be responsible for anyone you dragged from the planet-sized sewer you call Earth, and _that_ is a promise I mean to keep." Her lip curled as she flicked her gaze over Dib, as amusingly territorial as she'd been that day in our old house. "So why don't you go fetch a leash for your brother?" she sniped. "You'll be the one keeping him out of trouble from now on."

I rolled my eyes. "You know what? That reminds me. I brought you a little souvenir from Earth." From the folds of my gown, I produced a can of soda. In the time it took her eyes to widen at the sight, I'd shaken it up, popped the tab, and sprayed her straight in the face.

She screeched as she went up in smoke, stumbling back and scrabbling at her face. The crew member she'd been talking to stared at me with eyes the size of planets. Dib snorted smugly. "For old times' sake," I said, grinning, and handed Vix the rest of the can to drain.

Tak glowered at me, her skin giving off a hiss like burning bacon, brown beads hanging from her eyelashes and the ends of her antennae. "I could have you executed for that, you know," she snapped, wiping her face with her forearm.

"Ooh, I'm really scared." I slid an arm around her waist and steered her down the deck, waving Vix and Dib along with us. "Come on. Let's go slap some Febreze on the stench of humanity."

We headed up to the bridge, Vix riding on Tak's shoulders, me with one arm around Tak's waist and the other hand manacling Dib's wrist. There, we stood clustered on the platform, looking up at the viewscreen.

Fully unfurled for the occasion, it spanned the height and half the circumference of the room, and the Earth turned slowly at its center. Its satellites had already been quietly eliminated, to be replaced by a ring of sleeping teleporters. At a glance, they might almost have been far-off stars, the way they hung round and silver in the blackness of space.

"Clear for phase one of assimilation?" Tak addressed the crew below the platform, reciting the first line of the script burned into all of our brains.

"Yes, my Tallest," answered the captain of the bridge crew.

"Excellent." She spoke with practiced coolness, refusing to evince too much triumph too soon. Still, I could feel her relishing the command as she gave it – sucking on the words like hard candies. "Initiate depopulation."

I felt Dib tense as the teleporters opened, unfolding and unleashing beams of violet light. They shot to the Earth's surface in unison, piercing the atmosphere, sweeping over land and sea, and I let myself imagine their course.

I saw without seeing the people who wouldn't have the chance to glance about and panic, who wouldn't see or feel the beams that engulfed them. I saw them sucked up, carried away by the billions in the space of seconds. I saw pencils freed of fingers clatter to desks, pots crash to the floor halfway between the stove and the sink, driverless cars swerve en masse into buildings.

I saw purple light flood the roads and pour down every side-street, under cracks in doors, between prison bars, swirling up stairwells and elevator shafts. I saw cities, countries, continents emptied in the blink of an eye, and felt the rush, like wind blowing back your hair in a car with the top down, of billions of bodies' worth of energy suddenly displaced.

I saw the whole of humanity as it collectively stumbled into being in the colonies, into a string of huge containment halls constructed on Jupiter. But they wouldn't know where they were.

They wouldn't see the tanks outside, or the tubes behind the grates in the walls; they would only taste the artificial oxygen, antiseptic and dry. They wouldn't see the eyes behind the cameras in the corners; they would only know the heat and sweat of the bodies pressed against them. They would huddle helplessly in the halls, some shouting, some sobbing, some pounding the walls. Some would refuse to believe it. Some would snap from the shock.

They would know nothing, until Tak delivered her Address For the Assimilation of Earth. Nothing but that what used to be wasn't anymore. And each one of them, ignoring the others around them – knowing nothing of the races that had fallen before them, one after another, like dominoes – would think their horror unique.

Meanwhile, those who were left behind – those the bioselectors deemed unfit for labor – would blink around, bewildered. Dogs with leashes gone limp, horses with the weight lifted from their backs mid-canter. An old woman watching a teacup fall and shatter on the floor, when her daughter's fingers vanished from its handle.

Gowns crinkling as patients stirred in their hospital beds, wondering what had silenced the squeak of the nurses' shoes on tile. Kids thinking this might be pretty cool, that it might be like in Jimmy Neutron, that with no adults around they'd ride their bikes in the streets and stay up past bedtime and scarf Belgian waffles with chocolate sauce and ice cream until they puked.

Then came the first volley of the cannons, and none of that mattered anymore.

At first they tattooed the Earth with Tak's insignia, its antennae spiraling over Russia, the arrow of its face bisecting India. Then, the destruction exploded outwards, as the Armada set upon the Earth like lions on a zebra.

Blood-red lasers boiled the oceans and leveled the land, and what life was left turned to ash. The dogs and the horses, and the woman cradling her teacup, and the patients sticking their heads into the hall, and the kids trying to guess the passcode for the locked channels on the TV. They crumbled with the buildings, smoldered with the fields. They were the smoke rising into the atmosphere, the quickly-greying clouds.

An exultant cheer rose from the bridge crew, as the land masses blackened under the lasers. Beside me, Tak had her victory-laugh cranked up full-blast, shrieking and cackling at a pitch that'd leave anybody else hacking. Vix, perched on her shoulders, burst into a gale of giggles.

I didn't say anything. What could I have said, that anyone would've heard over that racket? I just dug my nails into Dib's wrist, and laid my head on Tak's shoulder, and watched as the Earth burned.


	36. Address For the Assimilation of Earth

**35. Address For the Assimilation of Earth**

"Attend me, human filth. I am the bringer of your end.

"I am Almighty Tallest Tak, and by my will you are now the property of the Irken Empire. I am not here to explain to you who we are, or from where we come; ours is a glory that needs no one to speak for it. Suffice it to say that we are vastly more numerous, more powerful, and more intelligent than you shall ever hope to be. The sooner you come to accept this, the better you will fare.

"The Earth as you know it is no more. All that you built, all that grew up around you, lies in ashes; all who do not stand in these halls are dead. As I speak, my people are reformatting your planet to make it hospitable to our purposes.

"Earth will become part of the network of planets that serves the Irken Empire, producing machinery in factories which we will build and you will staff. Until they are prepared to receive you, you will remain here, in temporary colonies on the planet you call Jupiter. When the time comes for you to return to your planet, it will be yours no longer. You will work for the Empire, until your race or the sun that sustains it dies.

"Know that there is no escaping your fate. As your dead cannot rise, as what is gone cannot return, you cannot change the course we have chosen for you. Today, humanity is reborn as a slave race, and you can no more reverse this than you can crawl back into your mothers' wombs. I warn you, resistance will bring only pain; we will not hesitate to strike down those who attempt to thwart us.

"When you have heard me, you will be stripped of all personal property and clothing, and branded with identification numbers that will replace your names. You will be disinfected and issued new clothing. You will be fed and housed here in the colonies until such time as you are needed on Earth, where you will be sorted according to the work to which you are best suited, and installed in barracks.

"We will keep you alive, and in exchange, you will give your lives to us. You will have what is needed to fuel your bodies, but nothing more; we will demand your obedience, but we will not reward it. Your days will be rigidly regimented, in order to maximize your worth as a labor force, and you will do nothing that is not productive. You will not be afforded the luxury of happiness.

"You will not be given answers. The workings of our minds are beyond your comprehension, and we have no obligation to satisfy your hunger for meaning. The fact is that the strong devour the weak; the question _why_ is irrelevant.

"Look on what has become of your world. See that we have crushed beneath our boots all that you were or would be. Humans are loathsomely self-centered creatures, but you will no longer have the satisfaction of believing that your towers are the tallest, your leaders the strongest there ever were.

"Your towers are dust now. Your leaders are slaves. Look on the thousands of years of your civilizations, your social constructs, your art and science and technology, and see that they have come to nothing. Know that they were always meaningless, and so are you.

"Know that we are your masters, the deciders of your destinies, at whose feet you will kneel in supplication to a power greater than that of your gods. We are your gods now."


	37. Visiting the Vivarium

Oh, Bender. How do you always know just what to say?

**36. Visting the Vivarium**

For seven billion people, the end of the Earth was the end of the universe, but to us it was business as usual. Tak redeemed her old shame, gave her address, and turned her attention to new conquests. The minutiae of planetary conversion were beneath her, so there was no reason for us to stick around while the Assimilation Council did its thing.

We took the Armada off down the band of the Milky Way – drifting slow, like a sated shark – and the Earth and its ruins were forgotten, another checked box on the Empire's to-do list. And why shouldn't we forget it? Nothing had really changed.

Nothing save the fact that I had a feral hybrid teenager squirreled away on the Massive, and Dib skulking around putting us all off our sodas. He didn't do or say much of anything, just hung around brooding and creeping everybody out, to the point that the crew began altering their routes to avoid him. Often, I'd find him just sitting slumped in front of a viewscreen, the space that surrounded us reflected in his glasses.

He refused to be fitted with a pak, so not only did I have to speak to him in English, I had to procure a room for him to sleep in and food that he could eat. And when I say _I_, I mean it. Tak, true to her word, had made sure everyone knew that _I_ was responsible for Dib, and that my duties were not to be delegated.

So, long story short, it frickin' sucked. Dad had been easy enough to take care of, but I was more than regretting having taken pity on Dib – and after a week of playing babysitter, I had decided that a plan of action was necessary. Two plans, actually.

Plan A: Finally find out what the fuck's going on with him and J4 (well, I had to call her _something _shorter than J499-62A, and it wasn't like I was going to name her Sparky), and see if that doesn't snap him out of his funk. I had no idea what he knew about her or how he'd react, but I figured he'd at least have to wake up and smell the mutilated lab rat unlucky enough to be schlepping his genes around like a sack of potatoes.

Plan B: If that doesn't work, throw him out the airlock.

So I showed up at his room one morning, unlocked the door (yeah, that was what we were reduced to; I'd had to set the reader not to let him out during certain times, so he wouldn't make trouble while I was asleep), and strode over to his bed, where he sat staring at the wall. "Get up," I said, shoving him in the shoulder. "There's something I've got to show you."

Normally, I'd have been bringing him breakfast at that point (because apparently, my stupid obligations had turned me into a service drone), but he didn't question the change in schedule. He just got up and followed me out the door into the hall, shuffling sullenly behind me as I headed down to the lower decks.

It was there that I'd decided to keep J4, hidden amid storage pods and spare rooms. The crew didn't go down there often, and when they did, it was only for a few minutes at a time. I felt sure no one would notice her there.

I hadn't wanted to stick Rel with her for good, so I'd told her to appoint somebody else to take care of her – somebody who didn't have anything better to do. Somebody the rest of the crew wouldn't miss. So she'd foisted the job off on PI, the random pink-eyed SIR unit whose story I'd never bothered to learn. When I swiped my palm over the reader outside storage pod twelve, we found her on duty just inside the doors, perched on a little stool in her pink helmet with its cables and triangular ears. I nodded to her and she nodded back, unspeaking.

We stood in a little antechamber, on one side of the glass wall that divided the room. On the other, I'd converted the storage pod into a kind of vivarium, with soft floors, warm, sleepy air, and gently curving walls – well, walls from where we stood. Inside, they would disappear behind holographic projections of any environment in the computer's data bank, expanding the smallish space infinitely in all directions.

The images were full-bodied, seemingly three-dimensional, and supplemented by all the sound and motion of their sources. More than once, I'd watched J4 smack into the wall trying to explore her new world, before she realized it only went so far.

PI and I had cycled through several different environments, and we still switched them up sometimes; J4 didn't seem to mind. So long as it didn't include humans, she was as amenable to a city as to a sea. Today's landscape, as displayed on the console outside the vivarium, was a jungle.

J4 was crouched at one end of the oval-shaped room, under what she probably thought was a banana tree or a hibiscus bush. PI must have given her a snack, because she was hunched over nibbling on something clutched in both hands. She ate like a squirrel, quickly and nervously, jerking her head up every few bites.

Dib and I stood there watching her through the glass. After a minute, he furrowed his brow, and said, "Okay. What the hell is this?"

I raised an eyebrow. "You mean you don't know?"

"Uh, no. Why should I?"

I studied him a moment, propping myself against the console, drumming my fingers in thought. "_This_ is," I said, "aside from Vix, the only human-Irken hybrid I know to exist. I found her hiding out in a warehouse in the industrial district. She grew up in a place called the East End Paranormal Research Facility, as their alien guinea pig." I pulled in a long breath through my nose, and let it out as a sigh. "And her human genes are yours."

He stared at me like I'd socked him in the stomach. "_What_?"

"She's your fucking daughter, Dib. How can you not know?"

"I—I—" His head swiveled between me and the glass wall. Like he couldn't decide between trying to tell me I was wrong, and looking at J4 to see if I was right. "But that's not _possible_," he insisted, his voice rising on each word, his face twisted with confusion and shock. "How could it—I mean, what would I have—"

"I did the DNA scan myself. You think I would make this shit up?"

"I don't know _what _you would do."

I shook my head. "Listen, just because you're a thirty-three-year-old virgin—"

"Who said I was?"

"The fact that you're _you_, that's who. Now shut up and let me explain." I glanced through the glass at J4, now finishing off whatever she'd been eating. Scrubbing her face clean with her hands bunched into fists, like paws. It was eerie, how like an animal she was; I got the impression she'd learned how to function outside East End by watching the rats in the industrial district.

"You don't have to have boned somebody to have a kid," I went on. "Did you think Tak actually knocked me up with Vix?"

A sneer flickered across his lips, weakened by what I guessed was nausea. "I tried _not_ to think about it, thanks."

"Well, she didn't. All you need to make one of these things are the requisite genes and an Easy-Bake oven; it's far from _impossible _that half those genes came from a flake of your skin, or a strand of your hair." I eyed him meaningfully. "You want to guess whose the other half are?"

"I—w—I—" His pallor was quickly ripening into a queasy yellow-green. "How the fuck am I supposed to know how she ended up with Irken genes? Until a week ago, the only Irken I knew was Zim, and…and…" The horror came to a head and he was momentarily lost for words, standing there slack-jawed and bug-eyed. When he did manage to pick up his thought, his voice came out squeaking like it had before it lowered, when we were kids and he was yelping and shrieking about aliens and vampires and Bigfoot all the time. "Are you saying she's _his_?!"

"I'm saying she's _yours_, Daddy. Plural."

His knees buckled and he crumpled against the glass wall, sliding down it like a pigeon that had crashed into a window. "_Fuck_," he groaned, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the floor. "Fuck."

I sat down beside him. "That's what I said."

He just sat there for awhile, processing, and I looked over my shoulder at J4. Having downed her snack and cleaned her face, she was heading for the dish of snirp juice (a snirp being a distinctly mild kind of Irken melon, and the juice they made of it the closest thing they had to water; PI had tried to feed her soda, but it was too sweet and one taste had her hacking) on the other side of the room, loping on her hands and feet across the spongy floor.

She flopped down in front of the dish and practically dunked her whole head into it, gulping down mouthful after mouthful like a camel on the run – as if she hadn't much time, and needed to drink as much as she could.

It wasn't that I relished treating her like an animal. I'd thought about giving her a bottle of juice instead of a bowl, but I knew from the brain tap (that and the way she moved an all fours, favoring her right hand, always listing slightly towards the left) that her hands didn't always work so well, and I wasn't sure if she'd be able to handle the screw-top.

I was hesitant to try to fix her, too. It'd have been pretty easy, with the medical tech at my disposal – with the help of a few lab monkeys, I guessed I'd have had her whole with a week's work– but it seemed to me that her scars were her only friends. She'd grown used to them; what life she had, she'd pieced together around them. I couldn't pull this rug out from under her just yet.

When I glanced away from the glass, I saw Dib looking in too. I watched him watching J4 slurp up the snirp juice, her good antenna bobbing with her head, the limp one lost in her hair. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, frowning. "Why does she act like an animal? Why are you keeping her in a cage?"

"I told you, she was raised as a lab rat. She never learned how to be anything else."

His eyes traced the black teeth of her sutures, like the seams on a patchwork doll. "How old is she?"

"Computer says somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. We can't get an exact read."

"Twenty years! I was—I was a _kid_ twenty years ago! To think that she'd been around—all this time—" He buried his head in his hands, spitting a muttered stream of curses at the floor. "It just doesn't make sense. Why would Zim make something like her? Make her and get rid of her, no less?"

"Fuck if I know. Did anyone ever get what was going on in his head?" I snorted. "Guess we'll never know now. Too bad Tak had him whacked before we could grill him."

"Uh—yeah." He glanced up at me through cracked fingers. "Now that you mention it," he said sheepishly, "there's…something I should tell you about that."

_Shit. _I should've known. "What did you do?" I snapped, jerking his hands away from his face.

"Well, I—after Tak told me she was going to have him 'eliminated', I went to his house and warned him. I told him everything you told me, and—and I told him to get off of Earth while he could." He flinched like he thought I was going to slap him, and I had to admit I was considering it. "I have no idea whether he actually took me seriously – I mean, he _laughed_ at me when I told him, and he maybe he never came around. Maybe he _was_ in the base when they zapped it. I just thought I should give him at least a _chance_, since nobody else was; it didn't feel like a fair fight."

"Bullshit. You were just pissed at Tak, and you were itching to screw up any part of her plan you could get your hands on. Since when have you cared about fighting fair?"

"It doesn't matter. The point is, there's a chance he's still alive, somewhere out there." As he climbed to his feet, his gaze strayed again to the glass wall, behind which J4 now lay curled up in the middle of the vivarium. She was absently pawing her face with the back of one hand, her tangles of dark hair billowing out around her, her right eye darting restlessly around the room. He shuddered. "There's a chance I could still find out—why."

"So what?" I said, getting up. "You're just going to take off looking for him? You don't even know where he is."

"Yeah, so? It's not like I've got anything better to do." He looked at me warily. "You're not going to tell Tak, are you? If she knows and she tracks him down first, he'll be dead before he can tell me anything."

"I won't tell her. She's got enough to deal with as it is. But you know," I added, "if you're going to go off into space, you'll need a ship. And knowing you, if you don't have a pak, you'll keel over scavenging for food before you can get within a galaxy of wherever Zim is."

He frowned. "Are you just mocking me, or are you going to help me?"

"Sure I'll help you. I'm a good sister, right?"

"You just want to get me off the Massive, don't you?"

"Bingo."

As far as I was concerned, this was all working out beautifully. For one thing, I would get rid of Dib. For another, if he wasn't around, he couldn't let it slip to Tak that Zim might still be alive, and God knew that wasn't a shitstorm I wanted to weather (I could hear her already: _this is all your fault! _You_ were the one who wanted to go and see him, and now look what he's done! Do you have any idea how much trouble you may have caused me, child? I should have you _and_ your slime-licking brother exiled to a sun!_).

And if by some chance he _did_ stumble across Zim before a six-armed swacknagger turned him into toothpaste, any answers he got would gratify me in turn. Unlike Dib, I actually had a life, and I wasn't about to put it hold just to find out what was up with J4; all the same, I wanted to know.

Before we headed out, leaving PI to her babysitting and J4 to do…whatever there was to do in the vivarium, Dib paused, glancing over his shoulder. "Does she have a name?"

"She has a number. J499-62A." I shrugged. "I've been calling her J4."

"J4." He repeated the name, such as it was, slowly. Then, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed. "_Fuck_."


	38. PIGI

And here we have our first new perspective since Tak's in chapter twelve. Plus flashbacks! Who doesn't love a nice flashback?

**37. PIGI**

_PI speaking_

_In my first memory, I look out at the world from inside a beam of orange light. Not that there's much _to_ the world, at first. In the beginning, my world is a lab, bathed in a pale red glow; in one corner, a small figure is hunched over a workstation. I can only see him from the back, but instantly, I identify him as Irken, one of the Master Race. An invader, or—something like it._

_Suddenly, another figure pops into my field of vision, even smaller and crackling with energy. He blinks round aqua eyes at me, and shrieks, "PIGI!"_

_He says it like you'd say the word 'piggy', but I know how it's meant to be spelled. I also know that it doesn't stand for anything. And I know another thing: we're already friends._

_I hop out of the beam onto the floor with the clatter and clank of metal limbs, landing in front of him. I don't have anything to say, so I burst into laughter, the sudden joy of life and freedom and curtains and bacon exploding into shrill, screaming peals that echo throughout the lab. I realize that everything is funny. The walls, the floors, the orange column shimmering empty on the workstation above us – somehow, it's all hilarious, and I couldn't stop laughing if I wanted to. Which I don't._

_"GIR!" barks the Irken at the workstation, whipping around to face us. "Is it so much to ask for you to—" _

_He cuts himself short when he sees me. I find myself blinking at my reflection in wide red eyes. "What have you…" His voice trails off and his eyes narrow, his face crumpling into a glare. He stomps over to us, shouting, "What is this?! What did you do now?!"_

_"I made a friend!" GIR announces gleefully._

_"What?! Who told you to do that?!"_

_GIR and I look at each other and shrug. He waits a second, maybe so if an answer to that question blows by, he can jump up and catch it and put it in a jar and give it to Master, to make him stop frowning. But the answers are migrating elsewhere this year, so he just starts again. "She's PIGI!"_

_Master furrows his brow. "You named it Piggy?"_

_"No. PIGI!"_

_"Well, that's—" Again, he interrupts himself, curling his finger back into his fist just as soon as he lifts it to lecture us. His eyes become slivers and he yells, "Just get rid of it! I don't want—"_

_His command is drowned out when GIR begins to cry, fountains of tears arcing from his eyes and flooding the floor. I retract the plates on my head and out comes a little umbrella. _

_"You're mean, Master!" he wails. "You always take my piggies! My bestest frieeends in the wholewideworld, and Michigan! Didn't you ever hadda bestest friend? Somebody to loves you, and hugs you, and make hats out of noodles and corn? My piggies! MY PIGGIES! They all did gones back to the sea!"_

_"I don't care!" Master snaps after looking bewildered for a moment. "Throw it in the incinerator! I'm not having—wait." Suddenly, he stops and glances about him, swiveling to search the whole of the lab with his eyes. "GIR," he says, his voice growing dangerously low, "what happened to the Tharlian power core?"_

_"I gave it to PIGI," GIR says brightly, then turns to me. "Happy Hanukkah!"_

_"YOU DID _WHAT_?!" Apparently displeased by this display of generosity, Master grabs GIR by the antenna, lifts him to eye-level and starts screaming at him, gesticulating wildly with his free arm. "YOU HORRIBLE SNOT-SUCKING WEASEL COW! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW _POWERFUL_ THAT THING IS?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET MY ARMY OF CYBORG VAMPIRE PONIES INFILTRATING CITY HALL BY TUESDAY IF YOU'RE USING THE THARLIAN POWER CORE TO MAKE YOURSELF A SPLUNKING PLAYMATE?!"_

_GIR blinks at him. "BEANS!" he cries in reply, after a second, and Master puts him down._

_"Well, you'll just have to give it back," Master demands of me, holding out his hand. "Hurry up. Do not waste the time of ZIM!"_

_I consider that. I'm not entirely sure what a Tharlian power core is, but apparently it belongs to me now, and I don't know that I want to give it away. I mean, you wouldn't, would you? If someone gave you a really nice present, like a trout, or a big wheel of cheese, you wouldn't just hand it over to the next hobo who walked by in striped socks, would you?_

_Of course you wouldn't. You would feed it and pet it and walk it twice a day and buy it a pretty dress for the prom. You wouldn't open yourself up like a music box just so some glowering not-even-invader could reach in and snap off your ballerina._

_"No thanks," are the first words I ever speak. "I think I'm gonna save it for a rainy day." _

_"What?!" Master shouts, infuriated. "Who dares say 'no' to Zim?! You will obey the Master Race, robot pig thing! Now GIVE ME the power core!"_

_"But if I give _you_ my power core, I won't be able to walk or talk or make sandwiches anymore."_

_"That's the _idea_," he sneers. _

_His hand shoots out towards me, and I know he means to take my trout, my ballerina, my big wheel of cheese himself. Without meaning to – without even being entirely aware of it – I do…something. I don't know what. A great wave of power crashes through me, radiates from me, rolls through the air and disappears. Suddenly, Master shrieks and stumbles back, his hand shriveled and smoking where it made contact with the Something._

_"Wretched little beast," he hisses, brooding over his hand. After a minute, he shakes it out and it snaps back to normal, but still he regards me with a scowl. "Fine," he says bitterly, almost spitting. "I guess I have no choice but to keep you around until I figure out how to get that power core out of your filthy little belly. But you'd better keep out of my way, or—or—or you shall taste the disgusting wrath of ZIM!"_

_"Yay!" GIR cheers. "Bestest friends!"_

_"Feliz Navidad!" I cry, a shower of confetti flying out of my head. _

_As he stalks back over to his workstation, I can hear Master muttering to himself. "Perfect," he grumbles. "Just perfect. This is exactly what I needed—_two_ GIRs ruining all of my plans."_

I sat outside of the vivarium watching J4, as she sat inside watching the hologram. Today's environment was a city – a Vortian city, of course. Not a human city. When Commander Gaz tested her with a human city, J4 had bolted to the center of the room, crouching, hissing, swiping helplessly at the shadows that moved over the walls. Not to mention how she'd cowered when Commander Gaz herself went into the vivarium.

In any case, she didn't mind the Vortians. She could sit all day absorbed in environments without humans, her right eye huge and bright with awe. And so went her days, one after the other, as time passed after the Earth fell and the man left; she would sit in the vivarium watching the artificial world go by, intruded upon only when I came in to bring her food. Sometimes, too, when Vixrai (who, when she learned of her, was fascinated by the existence of a hybrid other than herself, and who appeared Irken enough not to bother J4) came to play.

Commander Gaz said there was no need for titles or honorifics, but we could all tell that Tallest Tak took pleasure in them, and so we (well, some of us; at least those of us as low in station as I) appended to Vix's name the suffix –_rai. _After all, it would've been inappropriate for us to call her something like Princess, as we owed allegiance to her not as our future ruler but as the issue of Tallest Tak.

But the suffix _–rai, _historically – in the times before there were words like Captain and Councillor, in the old Irken language from which few relics remained – indicated only a person favored by a leader, so Vixrai she became. In this context, it would mean something like _Vix-beloved-by-the-Tallest._

Along those lines, I had nicknamed J4 _narai _– meaning _one-beloved-by-no-one, _or _forgotten._

It was nearing midday, according to the schedule J4 kept, so I prepared lunch and brought it in for her. I was allowed to choose what I fed her, so long as I kept her reasonably healthy, and today I entered the vivarium with a tray of bread, fruit, and long crispy stalks of a vegetable called _klat. _

Also balanced on the tray was a mug of warm _feeya_, which I'd determined to have her try to see if she might like it. I figured she had to be bored of snirp juice, drinking it day in and day out, and surely there was no harm in offering.

"Lunchtime, _narai_," I announced myself, and she flicked her eyes in my direction, cocking her good antenna curiously. I had noticed that, as she patterned the rest of her behavior on that of Earth animals, she used her working antenna like animals used their ears, even though it didn't serve the same function. "Come on."

I set the tray down and she padded over to investigate her meal, testing it by sight and smell (or as much of it as she_ could_ smell, with just her left antenna) before snatching up the hunk of bread. I could tell she was still unused to being delivered her food, having spent so long hunting it. She tore into the bread like it was a rat's hide, and gulped it down as if the Vortians might emerge from the walls to take it from her.

When she had finished with the bread, she dug into the fruit without regard for the juice, splattering her face and hands in her hurry to suck down the flesh. The _klat_ she pecked at like a pigeon, clutching the stalks in her fists.

Only once the food was gone did she attend to its ruins, scrubbing the crumbs from her face and licking the purple stains from her palms. As she made to lollop over to her dish, I reached out to take her by the wrist, saying, "Hold on a minute. There's one more thing."

I knew she didn't speak Irken and I wasn't even sure she understood English, but I'd gotten into the habit of speaking to her anyway, more for my benefit than hers. I didn't expect her to understand when I told her to wait, but she knew what I meant when I picked up the mug of _feeya_ and held it out to her.

"Try it," I said as she leaned down to look into the mug, her eye narrowing, her good antenna twitching. "It's good."

After a moment, she reached out and curled her fingers around it hesitantly, with the slightest spasm of her right hand that reminded me it was the bad one. "Careful, it's heavy," I said, as if that would help at all, and steadied the mug myself before she could drop it. Sliding my hand over hers, I pressed it palm-up against the bottom of the mug, where she wouldn't need to worry about sustaining a grip.

"Okay, _now_ try it. You'll like it, I promise."

It sometimes seemed to me that Commander Gaz thought J4 was stupid – as witless as the animals she imitated – but I knew she wasn't. Ignorant, yes, but not stupid. She knew the _feeya_ was hot, and she didn't dive into it like she did the snirp juice; she brought it to her lips and sipped it slowly, pausing to consider the taste. It was sweet, but not burning-sweet like soda, so I'd hoped she would be able to handle it.

She must have decided she liked _feeya_, because after that first sip she took another, and another, and eventually she closed her eye and lowered her antenna, basking in the sweetness and the steam. As a rule, J4 never smiled, I guessed because she'd never learned how; still, I felt sure that she was happy.

_"GIR! Can't you and that pink abomination be silent for once in your miserable lives?! I'm trying to WORK over here!"_

_With his arm wound up for the pitch, GIR pauses, glancing over at the workstation where Master stands. "We're playin' a game!" he chirps, and hurls the ball my way._

_Well, not a ball exactly. It's actually a bunny we found in the yard outside, curled up paws-to-nose so that it looks like a ball, and throws like one, too. It flies through the air and connects with the folded-up umbrella I wield, just in time for me to snap it open and send the bunnyball rocketing over GIR's head. _

_It smacks into a marinated ham hock glued to the wall, and I throw my arms in the air and shout, "Field goal! Eleventyfive points!" _

_The bunnyball slides down the wall and scrambles to its feet, dashing down the counter knocking over vials and beakers and pinballing between flickering screens. When it scurries across Master's workstation, sending whatever he's doing crashing to the floor, he whirls and scowls at us._

_"What did I JUST say?!" he rages, impotently pinwheeling his arms. "The Tallest said to have these nanobot prototypes ready to beam up for inspection in fifteen minutes! FIFTEEN MINUTES! How do you expect me to have them ready that soon with you spilling them all over the floor like—like—like things that get spilled all over the floor?!"_

_GIR blinks doubtfully up at him. "The Tallest didn't say that."_

_Master frowns. "Of course they did! Do you doubt the superior listening abilities of Zim?"_

_"Nuh-uh."_

_"Yuh-huh."_

_"Nuh-uh."_

_"Yuh-huh."_

_"Nuh-uh."_

_"Yuh-huh times infinity! Plus one! Victory for Zim!"_

_They're both silent for a moment, Master grinning, GIR staring up at him. When Master finally turns to head back to his workstation, GIR shakes his head, and says, "Nuh-uh."_

_Suddenly, a _thud_ and the tinkle of shattering glass ring out from the other side of the room, and all of our heads whip around in unison. "Bunnyball!" I shriek. _

_It's bounding through the wreckage of the lab towards the teleporter, all warmed up and ready to beam Master's whosamawhatzits to the thingamajiggy, and I decide I have to catch it. Powering up my jets, I shoot through the air after it, locking in on its white tail as it leaps up onto the counter and scrabbles into the teleporter—and, in a flash of light, disappears._

_"PIGI!"_

_GIR's cry is the last thing I hear before I collide with the light, and feel myself sucked in an instant through a million layers of space. Layers. Layer cake. Yum, cake. Thinking about cake – about a big space-cake sandwiched together with creamy planets, and frosted with sweet stars – I tumble through midair onto a new floor, clanging as I hit the ground. _

_The bunnyball wriggles in my arms. Looking up, we see new people blinking down at us: a lot of little red and purple people with half their faces cut off, plus two bigger red and purple people, floating like floaty things in the middle of the platform where the light spit us out._

_"Hi!" I lift a hand to wave and the bunnyball bolts, disappearing off the edge of the platform. The new people stare at me. _

_"What is _that_?" says the big purple. _

_"PIGI," I say cheerfully. "D'ya want fries with that?"_

_They didn't seem to hear me. "It's a SIR unit, genius," says the big red to the big purple, rolling his eyes. "What did you think?"_

_Big Purple frowns. "I _know_ it's a SIR unit. What I _meant _was, what's it doing _here_?"_

_A little red person with curly antennae looks up from her console. "The teleporter signal originates from Earth, my Tallest," she reports. "Which means—"_

_"Zim," says Big Red grimly, and Big Purple groans. "I wish I were surprised."_

_"Well, at least it's not a radioactive octopus this time."_

_"Somebody get rid of this thing," Big Red says, waving in my direction. "Throw it out the airlock or something. The last thing we need is more of Zim's crap cluttering up the bridge."_

_A pair of little purple people climb out of the ring around the platform and march over to me, their half-faces disappointingly unfriendly. Just when I think I'll have to use my Something to keep them away, Little Red cries out from her console, "Wait! It's got the Tharlian power core!"_

_The bridge freezes. A kajillion pairs of red and purple eyes snap back to me, and I think how funny it would be if they all slid out of their sockets and turned into red and purple balloons, drifting up and up to cluster at the ceiling. "_What_?" says Big Red. _

_"I'm as confused as you are," answers Little Red, looking down at the control panel on her console, shaking her head slowly. "But I'd know that power signature anywhere."_

_"Why would Zim have had the Tharlian power core?" Big Red demands. "We sent it to the fleet in the Znik system a month ago. If Zim put the core in this thing, what's powering Operation Starcrusher?"_

_Little Red is quiet a moment, her brow furrowed, her hands dancing across the control panel. These red and purple people are boring. I curl myself up like the bunnyball, magnetizing the long cones of my feet so that they stick to my forehead, and begin to roll back and forth across the platform, seeing how close I can cut the edge. _

_"Well, I don't know what the fleet in the Znik system is doing," I hear Little Red say after a bazillion years, "but they never got the Tharlian power core. These records show that it was shipped to Earth a month ago; that crate of face-eating fire slugs went to Znik." _

_"What? _Why_? Who decided _that_?"_

_Little Red shrugs. "The addresses must've gotten switched before they were shipped."_

_"HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!" Big Purple wails desperately, clawing at his temples. _

_"I don't know, but I'm going to set it right." Big Red turns to the Little Purples, and snaps, "Get the power core and get RID of that thing. It's scuffing the platform!"_

_I roll to a stop, peeling open like a pillbug when you poke it with a stick. It would be fun to be a pillbug, I think. I could make tunnels in the ground and roll down hills like rollercoasters and crawl into people's socks and make them scream, and every TV would seem like a movie theater, and if I had a grande chalupa it would last all year. _

_Plus I wouldn't have to deal with purples rushing at me with their hands and eyes and making me zap them with my Something, so that they jump back hissing and clenching their fists. Me and GIR could just be pillbugs and bestest friends and play ball with ourselves, and unroll the bunnyball and ride on it like a train._

_As I'm deciding that my new goal in life is to be a pillbug, the red and purple people are glaring down at me. "Well, we can't get rid of it," Little Red sighs. "Not if it won't give up the power core. Who knows what it might do with that kind of ammo, floating around in space unsupervised?"_

_Big Red and Big Purple look at each other sourly. "Then what _are _we supposed to do with it?"_

I was with J4 every day, and near all day, too. It wasn't like I had other obligations. The Massive's crew was glad to be rid of me, and I was glad to be around someone who actually seemed happy to see me – even if it was only because I brought food.

I spent most of that time just watching her, sitting on my stool staring through the glass, acting as a sort of sentient life support. The way Commander Gaz and my internal scans told it, J4's insides were a ticking time bomb, and any misplaced step or especially hard swallow could break the stitch that dammed the flood.

So I watched her, to make sure she didn't set herself hemorrhaging chewing on a stalk of _klat_, and without meaning to, I memorized her. The lines of her sutures snaking over her skin like roads on a map, with burn scars like mountain ranges in between. The rhythm of her gait, surprisingly graceful for a body that wasn't built to move on all fours. The way she communicated with her intact antenna, so that each flick was as good as a word: _yes, no, good, bad, come here, go away, what's that?_

I did wonder if she wasn't getting bored, though. When she wasn't sleeping, or eating, or playing with Vixrai when she came, she had nothing to do but sit and stare at the walls. Which were certainly more interesting than most walls, but _still. _Commander Gaz might've thought she was simple enough to be content with moving pictures, but I had begun to suspect otherwise.

Maybe it was just a reflection of my own restlessness, but eventually I decided she _had_ to be tired of the holograms, and I came in one morning with more than just breakfast for her. "Wake up, _narai_," I called, loud enough to wake her. "I've got your cereal."

J4 got up and came over to where I'd laid the tray, a bowl of hot cereal and a mug of _feeya_ arranged on it. She was learning to use a spoon for things like soup and cereal, instead of eating straight from her dish, and she wasn't bad at it, so long as she used her left hand.

It took a little longer for her to eat that way, but I thought it was a step in the right direction. I was also glad that she'd taken so well to _feeya_; ever since I'd first had her try it, her antenna pricked eagerly whenever she smelled it on the tray.

When she'd finished her breakfast and was cleaning her face, I turned my attention to a small bag beside the tray. I picked it up, undid its drawstrings, and dumped its contents onto the floor between us: multicolored plastic blocks, at least a hundred of them, in all different shapes and sizes. J4 paused and blinked down at them, with the gesture of her antenna that always accompanied an unspoken question.

"They're toys," I told her. "You're supposed to play with them." To demonstrate, I picked up one block and set it on top of another, then balanced a third on top of that. "See? It's fun."

She looked up at me, then back down at the blocks, processing. After a few seconds' thought, she chose a purple block, and began to build.

At first, the blocks swayed and fell each time she tried to stack more than three, the floor too springy and soft to support anything higher. I watched and waited, hoping she would figure it out without being shown. And she did: after her third tower tumbled, she knit her brow, shoved the empty dishes off the tray, and started over again on its hard surface.

"Very clever, _narai_," I said, smiling, but she was focused on the blocks; she didn't even look up.

Around us, a holographic sun had risen on a holographic meadow, and the yellow of the dawn was fading into blue. Glimmers of gold slid down blades of tall grass, waving in a breeze we couldn't feel. A swallow flitted through the air, then disappeared into the distance, slipping beyond the scope of the computer's data.

In the center of it all, J4 sat and constructed…something. She began with a square of blocks that took up the whole tray, then built upwards from there; she concentrated intensely and worked methodically, though I couldn't tell to what end. For awhile, all I could see in her structure was a slowly-stretching cube.

Then – when she was near the top, and trying to arrange a handful of small blocks into a thick, flat swirl – I finally understood. I put together the four even walls, the spiral-patterned roof, the stripes of alternating color, and I realized she was building a Vortian tribunal tower – part of the skyline of the city stored in the computer's database, last projected in the vivarium at least a week ago. She had picked it out of the rest and she had _remembered_ it, like she remembered the animal behaviors she mimicked, like she remembered the _feeya_ by its scent.

I wasn't sure whether to feel proud of her or sorry for her. If I'd been where she had, I wouldn't want a memory that good.

_"That's IT! I have had ENOUGH of this! If the lab doesn't finish with that stabilizer in the next FIVE MINUTES, I swear I'm gonna—"_

_"It's not nice to swear," I tell Big Red, leaping down from the ceiling (where I'd been perched grating a block of cheese over the platform, so that it would seem like snow, because who doesn't like snow? And cheese?) and landing on his head. I grab his antennae and give them a jerk, so that his eyes snap up to meet mine. "Don't make me tell your mommy on you!"_

_Big Red half-growls, half-shouts, reaching up to grab me. I jump off his head onto the platform and land in a perfect pirouette, like a ballerina, like my ballerina that's the only reason I'm still here. I'm still not sure whether that's a good thing, or bad. _

_"You'd think they could just stick it in a closet or something," Big Purple says despairingly, as I begin to dance the first act of Swan Lake. "Has anybody tried that yet?"_

_"Of course we've _tried t_hat," Big Red snaps. "The Tharlian power core was engineered to level _galaxies_. Did you really think a closet door was going to hold it back?"_

_"Well, as I always say, never underestimate the power of a well-crafted door."_

_"You've never said that in your life."_

_As I watch Big Red and Big Purple arguing, they transform into a pair of giant hotdogs, standing upright on the platform in their buns. All around them, the little reds and purples turn into squeezy-packets of condiments, red mustard and purple ketchup. I shriek with delight, thinking we're finally going to have some fun on this floating hunk of boring, and jump up to start snarfing the hotdog nearest me. _

_"It's done!"_

_Little Red's – the same Little Red from my first day here, I think, though they all look the same – voice rings out with the _whish _of the sliding bridge doors, and the world trudges back to sour reality. The hotdogs are gone and I'm gnawing on Big Purple's foot, which could use some salt. _

_"_Finally_," he sighs as Little Red hurries over to us, carrying a little remote control in one hand, and a weird translucent pink thing under her arm. "I was starting to think I was having a nightmare – a terrible, terrible pink nightmare – and I was never going to wake up."_

_"Don't get too excited," Big Red warns him. "Let's wait and see if it works first."_

_"Don't worry," Little Red says as she peels me off of Big Purple, plunking me down on the platform in front of her. "It'll work. Okay, PI," she says sweetly to me, using the name they call me here (just half of my actual name, pronounced individually like 'pee-aye', because they're big on Pride and Dignity and it wouldn't be Dignified to walk around calling anybody something that sounds like 'piggy', even if it _is _her name), "I've got this nice hat for you, and if you'll hold still for me a second I'll put it on. Sound good?"_

_I like hats, so I nod enthusiastically, tongue wagging like a dog's (even though I'm a PIGI, not a dog, or for that matter a pillbug). Little Red smiles and brandishes the hat, which is really more like a helmet, because when she puts it on me it doesn't just sit on top of my head – parts of it cover the back of my head and curl around my face, like a motorcycle helmet without the visor. _

_As I imagine I'm on a motorcycle, gripping invisible handlebars and growling 'vroom, vroom', I feel a sudden surge of electricity race through me, crackling in the ports on my posterior panel. Too late, I see Little Red press a button on her remote, and I feel the cables connect._

_A bright white flash envelops the bridge, and when my vision returns, everything looks different. The Tallest are staring at me expectantly, Purple hopeful, Red wary. The captain of the bridge crew wears triumph on her face. There are no hotdogs and no motorcycles, and when I think about it, I can't imagine why there would be. Nothing seems funny anymore._

_"Now," says the captain of the bridge crew, jabbing her finger in the direction of the doors, "go out to the main deck and see if anybody wants their boots polished. We can always use another service drone."_

_When I think about it, I can't imagine why I wouldn't obey her. What else I would do if I didn't. So I do._

_As I head for the doors, on legs that feel much heavier than they were a minute ago, I hear the Tallest break into relieved laughter, the bridge captain chuckling along with them behind the collar of her coat. "Well, I'm glad _that's_ over," Red says. "Tell the lab monkeys we said good job."_

_"You're sure it'll stay that way, right?" asks Purple. "It's not going to relapse and run in here trying to eat me?"_

_"It shouldn't," says the bridge captain. "So long as it wears the stabilizer, its systems will be regulated and it'll be perfectly obedient."_

_"If it's so _obedient_," says Red, irritation barbing his tone, "then why don't you just _tell _it to give us the power core already, and turn it into scrap metal?"_

_"The power core protects itself. Whether it has reason to or not, the vessel it's installed in will defend it automatically. We're better off engineering a new power source for Operation Starcrusher than wasting our time trying to get this one back."_

_"Fine. Remind me to call the Tharlians and tell them their technology sucks."_

_"Duly noted, my Tallest."_

_"Hey, wait a second!" Purple calls, and from the way his voice travels I know he's calling me. A foot from the doors to the main deck, I turn back towards the platform, to see Purple grinning and beckoning me. "Come back over here. I've got an idea."_

_"Jeez, what now?" Red groans as I march dutifully back to the platform._

_"Hold on, hold on. It'll be funny. You'll see." He grabs the remote from the bridge captain's hands and starts to fiddle with it, snickering under his breath. Reflected in his chestplate, I see the interlocking panels of the stabilizer slide and shift, and a pair of little pink triangles pop out with a _click – _little pink triangles like pigs' ears, glinting on top of my head. _

_"You wanna be a piggy so bad?" Purple says, smirking down at me. "You got it."_

_The Tallest and the bridge captain burst out laughing again, spluttering and gasping and oinking at me, and I can think of nothing to do or say. Before, I might've crossed my arms, stomped my foot and corrected him, saying, 'how many times do I have to tell you? I'm not a _piggy._ I'm PIGI!' But I'm not really even that anymore. And there are a lot of things I might have done before that I know I won't do again._


	39. Fair

The next chapter will probably be fairly short (if not quite as short as Chapter 35), so it should be up more quickly than usual.

**38. Fair**

"Down by the bay," (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"Where the watermelons grow," (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"Back to my home…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"I dare not go…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"For if I do…" (slap-slap, slap-slap)

"My mother will say…"(slap-slap, slap-slap)

"Did you ever see a goose kissing a moose?"

"Down by the bay!" Vixrai squealed the last line, leapt up and threw her arms around J4's neck, sending them both tumbling backwards onto the floor of the vivarium. "That was great!" she enthused as she peeled herself off and picked herself up, flashing her cousin an ear-to-ear smile. "You're so good at it now!"

J4 mirrored her smile and watched as Vixrai danced around the room, twirling and bouncing and singing the song to herself. She was right: after several months' practice, J4 could keep up with her word-for-word and slap-for-slap, no longer staring blankly while Vixrai sang. She'd memorized all the words of the song and the motions that accompanied them, so that when Vixrai sang one line, she responded with the next.

It was Vixrai's favorite game to play, when she came to visit her cousin, and I suspected that was because it let her convince herself that J4 was _normal._ That she was the big sister Vixrai had always wanted, instead of a preverbal, disfigured creature who moved on all fours and lived in a glass cage.

I told myself I knew better, but even I'd had to smile hearing her voice for the first time. It came out high and clear when she sang with Vixrai, like a tinkling chime. Still, it was one thing to hear her speak; it would've been another to hear her say something.

"Vix!" Suddenly, Commander Gaz's voice crackled through one of the speakers on the wall, concealed by the holograms but no less functional for it. J4 snapped to attention and she glanced confusedly around the room, searching for the source of the noise. "Playtime's over, babe. Let's let J4 get some rest."

"Well, I guess gotta go now," Vixrai said, prancing back over to where we sat, "but I'll come back tomorrow, okay? And I'll bring my toys. You like dolls, right?"

Whereas I spoke to J4 knowing it was only for my own comfort, Vixrai always seemed to expect answers to her questions, and waited rocking back and forth on her heels. J4 blinked at her, lips wavering in an uneasy half-smile.

"Okay, well," Vixrai said with a shrug, heading for the door, "see you later!"

I followed her out into the antechamber, where Commander Gaz stood over the microphone on the console. I knew she wasn't pleased by the fact that she, who had effectively rescued J4, couldn't even set foot in the vivarium without sending her into paroxysms of terror. But she'd accepted it gracefully enough, and now she stayed out of sight when she came by.

"What's up, PI?" she said when she saw me, hitching her chin in greeting.

"Uh…" For several years now, all of my interactions had taken the form of either obeying orders or shouldering insults, so I was never quite sure how to respond to Commander Gaz's stabs at conversation. As Vixrai plopped down on the floor to pull on her boots, I glanced awkwardly around the room, until it occurred to me that there _was_ something I wanted to say. "Commander Gaz, may I—ah—make a suggestion?"

She shrugged. "Yeah, whatever. Shoot."

"Okay, well—it's just that—I think you might be well-advised to arrange for Vixrai to meet you in the antechamber at an agreed-upon time, instead of calling her with the microphone. J4 can't see where your voice is coming from and—um—I'm afraid it bothers her, is all."

Commander Gaz looked at me a moment, one eyebrow raised. "Uh, okay," she said at length. "If it means that much to you."

Vixrai tugged on her second boot, got to her feet and joined us at the console, her brow furrowed in thought. "Mommy," she said, saving me from fumbling for a response, "how come J4 won't talk to me? I mean, she sings with me, but she doesn't talk to me. Does she not like me? Did I do something wrong?"

"No, hon. That's just the way she is." Commander Gaz lowered a hand to stroke the plum-colored crown of Vixrai's head, considering how best to simplify her niece's circumstances. "It's not that she doesn't _want _to talk to you, it's that she doesn't know how. She doesn't have a pak and no one ever taught her, so she doesn't speak any language, and she doesn't understand when you speak to her."

"But she knows how to sing!"

"She knows how to parrot you when _you _sing. If you repeat something – like that inane song – enough times in front of her, she can regurgitate it, but she doesn't understand what she's singing. It's just noise to her."

"Oh." Vixrai's face fell. Glancing in at J4 through the glass, she chewed on her lower lip, and said hopefully, "Is she going to get better?"

"I don't know." Commander Gaz heaved a sigh. "Listen, Vix, why don't you scoot? I'm going to stick around and chat with PI for a minute, and then I'll come and find you."

"Okay, Mommy. Bye, PI."

As Vixrai's footsteps click-clacked down the corridor, Commander Gaz looked down at me. Telling myself not to assume the worst, I tried not to shrink under her gaze. "It's no big thing," she said, her hand fluttering dismissively through the air. "I've just been meaning to say I'm—well, I'm grateful to you for being so good about taking care of J4.

"I know it's not exactly anybody's dream job – 'unpaid babysitter' isn't a gig most people are clamoring for, especially when the term is indefinite – but you seem to have done pretty well with her, and it's a load off my mind not to have to worry about it."

"Oh, it's absolutely fine," I assured her, pleasantly surprised. "This is the best job I've had in years. I don't mind looking after J4. I think—she could've been a really great person, if it weren't for…you know." I swallowed, and amended, "Not that she isn't great as is."

"Uh—yeah. She's a real barrel of monkeys." Regarding me with something between amusement and confusion, Commander Gaz shook her head slowly and made as if to leave the antechamber, saying over her shoulder, "Anyway, that was all. We'll be back tomo—"

"Wait!" Again, I was surprised, this time by the force and suddenness with which the word tore from my throat. "I mean—before you go, Commander Gaz, may I…ask you a question?"

"Ask away. And for the millionth time, quit calling me _Commander _Gaz."

"I was just wondering if—if you ever looked into what became of the staff at East End. The ones who were there when…the ones who did…"

I found myself unable to finish the sentence, but it wasn't as if I had to. Of course, she knew what I meant. "Not specifically, no. But they'd have to be either dead or part of the labor force, just like everybody else." She eyed me suspiciously. "Why?"

"I just—" I cut myself off, struggling to find words for feelings I hadn't known I had. "Don't you think someone should _do_ something?" I said desperately. "Slavery is too good for them. It's not _fair _that they should just—_get away_ with it, what they did to her, to a living feeling thing, with no more punishment than all of the other humans! Didn't you ever want to find them, and—and—"

Commander Gaz let out a long breath, shoving her hand through her hair. "Look, PI," she said, not unsympathetically, "I'm the last person to speak out against revenge. I'd love to see those people suffer, because yeah, I believe they deserve to."

She paused and her gaze shifted to the glass wall. "But that vengeance isn't ours to take. Number one, I'm raising a kid, commanding a fleet, and – as my brother says – playing intergalactic house with the Almighty Tallest. I don't have time to launch a vendetta on behalf of somebody who isn't even supposed to exist. Number two, the thing about revenge is that it's kind of a DIY activity. If and when J4 is capable of deciding that it's what _she _wants, I'll be more than happy to strap those assholes down and hand her a scalpel – but it's not my place to do it for her."

"But what if she's _never_…capable?" I said weakly, almost whispering. "What happens then?"

"Nothing." One corner of her mouth rose in a bittersweet half-smile. "I know it can't be easy, being with her every day, thinking about this stuff all the time. But try not to dwell on the past. I mean, which is going to help her more in the long run: making progress and moving on, or decorating a Christmas tree with those motherfuckers' intestines?"

I tried to smile back. "I suppose you're right, Commander Gaz," I said. "Thank you for your time."

"No problem, Commander PI." She widened her eyes at me. "See how annoying that is?"

When she'd gone, I returned to the vivarium, bringing J4 a mug of fresh-brewed _feeya_. She curled up with it against the wall (today, a panorama of Shrithian sea life) and I nestled next to her, her skin warm against the cold sheen of my shell.

I looked up at her, the light and dark of her, the ridges and valleys of her, the unrevealing outside of her that begged a thousand questions and answered none. I wondered if she understood _revenge. _If she thought about what they'd done to her and wanted justice, if she even knew what justice _was—_if she harbored the same the hot coal of anger that burned inside of me.

"You _must _be angry," I said, and an inscrutable scarlet eye rolled down towards me. "You must know it's not fair."

I had wondered when I brought her the blocks if I, like the computer that projected worlds onto her walls, was projecting my unhappiness onto her. I asked myself the same question now. Maybe _fair_ and _not fair_ were beyond her powers of perception. Maybe she wasn't angry, or bitter, and time had washed away her memories of East End and everything that had happened there. Maybe _I _was the one who was being unfair, expecting her to resent her _narai_-ness like I did mine.

A fish the size of a battle tank slid through the ocean above J4's head, its scales flashing in a shaft of diluted light. She licked her lips and stared at the emptied mug in her hands. From its reflective surface, her own face looked back at her, her pale lopsided face framed by a cataract of shining black hair.

Vixrai had taken it upon herself to wash, comb and trim it, and though the project had eaten up a week's worth of playtimes, J4 did look better for it. Her hair, tugged out of its tangles, hung like a silken curtain over her shoulders, fanning out behind her when she lay down. Her limp antenna stood out against it, no longer swallowed by its snarls.

She drew her fingers over her reflection on the mug, and I knew she was seeing no stranger. She recognized herself, her right eye bright with dark lashes and the picket fence of sutures closing the lid of the left, her mouth with the occasional red crater between white teeth. The scars on her cheeks, chin and forehead, finer than the ones lower down, like the spider's-web cracks in a dropped china plate. The black hair and white skin that hadn't made her human enough.

As ever, she was unfathomable, her mind impenetrable where her body hadn't been. As ever, I waited for something that wouldn't come. However badly I longed to know what she felt, staring herself in the face, I would get nothing through the wall between us. And a wall it was, I felt sure of that; it wasn't that she wasn't _there_, under the stitches and scar tissue. It was just that she couldn't get out.

"It's not fair," she said softly, still watching herself in the curved side of the mug. _It's just noise to her, _echoed Commander Gaz's voice in my head. She was only saying it because she'd heard me say it, not because it meant anything to her.

Then, another voice, resounding from much further off. _The Tharlian power core was engineered to level galaxies, _the Tallest had said, all that time ago.

Surely it could knock down a wall.


	40. The Clouds Clear

YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

Ahem. Moving on, I've also heard about the whole…what do they call it…"language window" thing in children. As you said, though, RKB, concepts of human development don't entirely apply to someone who isn't entirely human; worth considering, too, is the potential of Irken technology to fix a lot of problems that might otherwise be hopeless. But yeah, I know what you mean. If this story were completely realistic, taking place on Earth in the present day with a human character in J4's situation, said character probably wouldn't even be doing as well as she is at this point.

As for Vix's happy-go-luckiness, it's certainly something to be curious about. My thought process is that even though she's being raised by people who aren't by any means sweet or kind, she's never had a reason not to be. She's very sheltered and she gets everything she wants. Unlike people like Gaz and Tak, who had to develop their tough skins to get by in a crapsack universe, being the de facto Irken princess means that Vix is growing up in what amounts to space Candyland.

Of course, that also means that in addition to being nice, she's pretty naïve, and self-centered, and entitled. I mean, this is a girl who laughs while the world burns, not because she's _evil,_ but because she has no concept of why it should matter what happens to people who aren't her friends or family; they aren't even really _people _to her. Which I think is common to kids in general, but that lack of perspective is going to stick with Vix past the point when she ought to grow out of it. Innocence is a double-edged sword.

…oh, and thanks, Nathan Crowley! ^_^

**9. The Clouds Clear**

_J4 speaking_

She doesn't tell me what she's doing before she does it. Or—maybe she does, but I don't understand. I don't speak her language, or anybody's. I just see her mouth moving and hear her voice, gentle, like water flowing over river-rocks.

Then she stands, expressionless. A fountain of cables erupts from the back of her helmet, and they whip through the air towards me, so fast I couldn't dodge them if I tried. The moment they touch me they plunge into me, like a scalpel except they don't hurt after a second; they come in with a pulse of electricity, a handful of little _snaps_ like rubber bands, and then, nothing. Numbness. My flesh irises shut around them, no blood.

Now I'm radiating cables – cables in my neck, between my ribs and the vertebrae of my spine, in my head under my hair. Like tubes except they don't need to be taped down, and they don't hang limp between me and her. Their lengths float in midair, suspended by an energy I can only feel, not see.

It swells slowly around us, filling the air, and her eyes begin to glow; the ocean around us flickers, once, twice, then disappears, taking the light with it. A soft hum I hadn't noticed until now dies away. It's just me and her in the darkness, the neon pink half-moons of her eyes hanging in black, starless space. Me and her and the cables and the energy, breathing its breath into me, making my head swim.

Suddenly, a terrible sound like a clap of thunder cracks me in two. I gasp, and the empty mug drops from my hands.

For a moment, even her eyes are wiped away, so that my world is nothing but darkness. Darkness, I'm not afraid of – more than darkness, light: bright white light in discs that hover above me, in long triangles roving across brown grass – but I don't like how I'm falling through it, how the room seems to tilt and let me slide to its edge. I scramble for a hold, but in the end I fall, fast and breathless, through a long, long tunnel of night.

When I hit the ground, everything has changed.

The clouds have cleared. Always, I walk in clouds, but now they melt away and the sky beyond is blood-red; when the clouds go, they leave me sick with the feeling called _anger_, called _hatred_, called _bitterness._ I've never felt it before and I wouldn't know what to call it, except that I know everything now. The words that swirled above me, here and before here, all of a sudden make sense. The pieces come together, finally, and the picture is ugly.

I touch my scars in the darkness and know that somebody owes me for them. I feel the pain that is my constant companion, the dull throb I taught myself to ignore, and burn with the need to share it. My memory, once a shifting, unpredictable thing, becomes sharper than any scalpel, and it wedges itself beneath my sutures and breaks them all open and I'm bleeding again, bleeding and screaming, curled up clutching my head in my hands.

But this isn't a scream I've screamed before. It isn't pain or fear that's ripping up my throat on the way out, and it isn't a lament. It's less a scream than a howl, a war cry, a great rending roar that breaks and heals me at the same time. I'm not screaming for what's been done, but for what I have to _do_ – for the only thing that will ease the weight that's bearing down on me, nearly crushing me within the first seconds I feel it.

I've never felt rage before, but it's a heavy thing. The knowing, the _understanding _is a blow that would have knocked me down, were I standing, and for a moment I wonder if it's worth the price.

It doesn't matter. The clouds have cleared, and there's no such thing as un-knowing.

"It's not fair," I say to PI's glowing eyes, and this time it's more than just sounds sliding over my tongue. _Not fair _is scalpels and droppers. _Not fair _is sutures and scars. _Not fair_ is the beast clawing me up inside, the hot kernel at the heart of anger, and _not fair_ means _it shouldn't have happened to me. _

I don't think that's something I knew before.

"I know," she says softly, reaching up to touch my face. "But we're going to set it right."

She has me turn and she climbs up onto my shoulders, holding my antennae, and the fact that I can only feel her grip on the left one is—not just a _fact _anymore. It's an injustice. It's _not fair._ A growl crackles in my throat as I rise to my feet, with none of the pain or effort it took when I stood to push open the door of my chamber. The clouds no longer churn about my feet and I can stand up straight, my old chains crumbling in the thrum of the energy.

PI tells me that she'll take care of everything. She will find them. She will take me to them. She will give me the tools I need. All I have to do is strike the blow when the time comes, and I'm already seething with the desire to do it now. We will find the people who broke me, she says, and we will break them; then, we will find the people who made me to be broken, and we will find out why. Then we will break them, too.

I'm ready.


	41. The Shadow Strikes

Thanks for the spirited defense of my work, RKB, but I've already informed ngrey651 that I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who obviously doesn't respect me or my work. My dealings with him are done.

I have to say (tongue-in-cheekily) that this is all reminding me of a song from The Lorax, which, when I saw it for the first time the other day, made up for its general mediocrity with some bitchin' musical numbers. "How ba-a-a-ad can I be? I'm just followin' my destiny…"

(I mean, seriously, the movie didn't make me want to save the environment; it just made me want to be best friends with the Once-ler. He's adorable, he has mommy issues, and he plays the electric guitar. What more could a girl ask for?)

**40. The Shadow Strikes**

_Gaz speaking_

"Commander Gaz!" I woke to the sound of quick, soft rapping on the bedroom doors, and Rel's urgent whisper filtering in through their seam. "_Commander Gaz!_"

I peeled open sticky eyelids and took a moment to orient myself in the darkness. I remembered falling asleep spooned up to Tak's back, my head buried in the crook of her neck, and I felt her stir at the same time I did. She muttered something unintelligible into the pillow. "What time is it?" she said again, sounding about as happy as I was to have been jerked out of a sound sleep.

"Late." I groaned and rubbed my eyes. "What do you want, Rel?"

"There's something you must come and see, Commander Gaz. Immediately." She hesitated, lowering her voice a little further. "It's about J4."

Tak sort of snorted, a smug _ha!_ muffled by the pillow. "I told you that thing would be nothing but a pest."

"Oh, shut up. You're not the one who has to deal with her." Kicking off the blankets, I finger-combed my hair, shoved my feet into a pair of slippers, and headed for the doors in nothing but my knee-length Game Slave 4 T-shirt. Rel, disquietingly enough, was too panicked to spare it a second glance. "All right, let's go," I yawned, motioning her down the hall. "This better be good."

She scurried ahead of me through the corridor and across the main deck, all the while filling me in in hushed, nervous tones. "Well, the first thing you should know is that J4's not in the vivarium," she said. "Neither is PI. And there's a cruiser missing from the docking bay."

She rounded a corner sharply, and glanced warily about the new stretch of hallway before she picked up speaking again. "The second thing is that, a few hours ago, several of the barracks in the labor housing complex on Earth were entered by an unidentified SIR unit claiming to be an emissary of the Armada, and several humans were removed and escorted by said SIR unit to a spare building in the complex."

Rel passed her palm over the reader outside a hollow interface room. Inside, we rode a pair of hoverdiscs up to the center of the screen, on which a paused video stream displayed a still image of a dark room. "This," she said grimly, reaching out to touch the 'play' icon on the screen, "is the footage from the security camera in that building."

_In a dark room, glowing green in the camera's night vision, stands a row of seven bunk beds. Sitting on each bed is a human silhouette, each clad in a standard-issue labor force jumpsuit. The footage is too fuzzy to make out much detail in their features, but there are some who can be distinguished from the others._

_There's an older man with a white nailbrush mustache, and a middle-aged woman who sports a fountain of frizzy curls. Another woman, probably the youngest of the bunch, picking restlessly at her cuticles. A heavyset man with thick fingers and hairy knuckles, leaning over the side of one bed, palming his knees. _

_There are fourteen beds, but no one sleeps. All are huddled, crouched, curled on bare mattresses in metal bedframes, some fidgety and twitching, others unmoving. Most are speaking between the beds, trading whispers just low enough that they reach the recorder as soft crackles of static. As the seconds flicker by on the clock in the corner of the screen, fourteen humans sit and wait on the bottoms and tops of seven bunk beds, until five minutes have passed._

_Then, a long, white stripe of light slides through the room. At one end, a pair of doors are _whish_ing apart – and although they open quickly, time seems to slow as they do. A slender shadow blocks out the light. It wears a skintight red jumpsuit, with built-in gloves and boots that swallow all skin save its face. _

_Above the neck, the figure is put together like a puzzle, a handful of geometric pieces layered to give form to its head: a circular face, near as white as the light that surrounds it, set against a waist-length rectangle of dark hair. The red hemisphere of a single eye, slit and staring. The square spiral of an antenna, flattened like a hissing cat's ears. _

_Rising behind it—part of it but not part of it—is another, smaller circle of a head, silvery-white and pink, with triangular ears and crescented eyes. The two are linked by limbs comprised of more shapes – white triangles of legs wrapped around red shoulders, white circles of fists clutching black antennae – and pink cables that stream, weightless, through the air around them. As the doors close, the fluorescent green of the darkness returns, punctuated by three bright spots of colored light: two neon pink eyes, and one red. _

_Like a moving collage, the collection of construction-paper cutouts glides with clicking boot-heels towards the beds, its silhouette somehow a shade darker than the rest of the room. In a flash of red, a glowing arc bursts from its left wrist and resolves into a shape like a sickle, its sharp tip glimmering six inches out from shadowy intimations of fingers. _

_It's a laser-blade, with a stronger swing and a cleaner cut than any other weapon; it could slice through a human spine as if it were crepe paper. The kind of weapon one wields when a gun is too impersonal. The kind of weapon with the precision of advanced technology, and the brute force of a beast. _

_No one speaks – not the humans, nor the shadow that stands facing them. In the moment before the stillness ruptures, the woman with the curly hair's eyes widen, and her lips move soundlessly. Shaking her head slowly, she mouths what looks like the word _no.

_She's the first. Like a cobra, the shadow strikes in the blink of an eye; one moment, the woman is shaking her head, and the next it dangles by a strip of flesh from her neck. Her blood spurts white-green, shimmering unsteadily, and her body flops back, limp, onto the mattress. Her face is frozen in a grimace, her mouth hanging open. The young woman a bed over screams._

_The room shatters into a flurry of motion as thirteen humans explode from their beds. Some bolt for the other end of the room; some run in frantic, aimless circles; some clamber up to the tops of the bunk beds, or cower behind the bedframes' poles. A few charge the shadow head-on, one grabbing its arm and wrenching, another swiping blindly at the thing on its shoulders. _

_These, it deals with next. It detaches one with an effortless jerk of its arm, and summarily disembowels him; the other, repelled by an electric pulse from the shadow-atop-the-shadow, stumbles back as it whirls on her. The laser-blade swoops through the air and severs her at the waist._

_The humans' numbers reduced to eleven, they don't attempt to fight back. Instead, they pound on the walls, shouting, or huddle gibbering with terror on the top row of bunk beds. One tries to dash past the shadow and rush the doors; its arm shoots out and he runs right through the blade, collapsing into slippery, sputtering halves. The shadow approaches the bunk beds, takes hold of the first bedframe, and swings itself up onto the top row. There's enough space between the beds and the ceiling for it to stand upright, three glowing eyes fixed on a panicked mass of humans. _

_As it strides calmly down the row, stepping over the spaces between beds, they scramble backwards. Two heads roll on the second bed, and stumps of necks feed the mattress like a spout feeds a fountain. One makes it to the fourth before the blade gores him from behind, its tip erupting from his lung before his eyes. _

_Between the fourth and fifth beds, the nervous nail-picker trips and slips through the gap, howling with pain when she lands the wrong way on one leg. The shadow leaps down behind her, cards its right hand into her hair, tips her head back and slits her throat, quick and neat._

_It scales the beds again to find two humans huddled on the last one, their backs pressed to the wall and their arms shielding their heads, shaking, sobbing. One blubbers a plea for mercy, but the shadow dispenses none. It picks one up by her hair, lays the edge of the blade at her ear, and bisects her head with a swipe._

_As her body tumbles off the bed, the shadow shoves the blade up through the open mouth of the other human, silencing his breathless bargaining. It twists the blade and yanks it out, spattering the mattress with blood. Vaulting down off the last bed, it finds another human shrunk into the corner where the frame meets the wall, and skewers him through the stomach. A woman hunkered down under the lower bed is pulled out by the ankle, squirming and shrieking; the shadow eviscerates her in one blow. _

_The man with the white mustache has bloodied his fists striking the wall, hollered himself hoarse. The shadow's claws come down on his shoulder and jerk him around to face it – to face the blade as it plunges into his heart. His breath stutters, his knees buckle, and he crumples to the floor._

_The last human left is a woman crouched in a corner, sniveling. The shadow's boots leave bloody, spade-shaped prints on the floor as it closes in on her, brandishing the red crescent of the blade. "Please," the woman chokes out. "I'm sorry. We never—I didn't—I'm sorry!"_

_Tilting its head to one side, the shadow inspects her with three emotionless eyes. "It is interesting to note," it says without pleasure, without any inflection at all, "that despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, the human persists in believing that its life will be spared. One wonders if this is owed to shock, or if it is simply a lower life form."_

_A moment passes and the woman whimpers, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then, the shadow bends over her, sinks its claws into her scalp, and pins her head to the wall. The last human sound in the room is the woman's dying gurgle as the blade punctures her throat. _

_The shadow straightens up, letting the woman's upper body pitch forward and hit the ground. It turns to stride silently back through the room. It looks ahead without sparing a glance for the slaughter, stepping over the bodies in its path. When it reaches the doors, a _snap_ resounds as it retracts the laser-blade. With one forearm, it wipes the blood from its face, then shakes it out of its hair. _

_It waves its hand over a panel in the wall, bidding the doors open. Blinking in the sudden light, it exits the pod, and the camera feed cuts off. _

"Well, _shit._" I sighed and pushed a hand through my hair. "I didn't think she had it in her."

"I wonder if she _did_ have it in her," Rel said quietly. "I've never liked that SIR unit, you know."

"She did tell me she thought someone ought to _do_ something. Guess she decided she had to do it herself." Dropping down to sit on the hoverdisc with my legs swinging over the edge, I slumped over and rested my chin in my hand. "I'm not surprised, actually. They're both members of Zim's weird little family; it figures they'd get together and do something crazy."

"So how do you want to address it?" Rel asked. "Should we send someone out to intercept them? PI's disabled the tracking device in the cruiser – do you have any idea where they might have gone?"

I considered that, chewing on my lower lip. "No, let's not bother chasing them," I decided after a minute. "PI's powered by the Tharlian power core, remember? It'd take half the Armada to go up against the Tharlian power core, and I'm not interested in bugging Tak to deploy a huge chunk of her forces just to avenge a bunch of douchebags—_or _to protect my dipwad brother and his Irken baby mama."

Rel widened one eye. "So you think that's where they're headed?"

I shrugged. "Probably. I mean, if they're not coming back here."

Pressing a button on the side of the hoverdisc, I floated back down to the floor of the hollow interface room, Rel close behind me. "They might be a couple of crazy bitches," I told her, standing up and heading for the door, "but PI's got a pretty good head on her shoulders, at least when it's in that helmet. I don't think they'll hurt anybody they don't have to. Let's wait and see how it plays out."


	42. A Failed Experiment

Actually, RKB, I've never seen any of the Star Wars movies. And…just so you know, you're welcome to criticize me if you want to. Every time you say anything that could possibly be construed as negative, you're quick to qualify it with "not criticizing", and though I appreciate it, it's really not necessary. I don't want my reaction to ngrey651 to make other readers think that I'm not receptive to _constructive _criticism; I'm happy to hear the good and the bad, so long as it's all coming from a place of respect for me and my work. I just have little patience for flames.

Oh, and this is irrelevant to the preceding paragraph, but all I could hear in my head while reading your ruminations about Zim's family tree was Maury Povich going, "You are not the father."

Okay, time to get serious! Reunions! Revelations! Resolutions! And DIB'S GONNA TALK TO US NOW, GUUUUYYYS

**41. A Failed Experiment**

_Dib speaking_

My life had always been a constant parade of suckage. But when I found out that not only were my little sister and her alien overlord girlfriend taking over the Earth—not _only_ was everything I'd spent thirty-three years trying to stop going to happen no matter what I did, and leave me living as lame a life as I'd lived on Earth on the flagship of the race that had enslaved humanity—but that I somehow had a retarded kid with my archrival of twenty-two years, things got substantially worse.

I mean, what the fuck? Just—seriously, what the fuck? If you'd asked me to make a list of the top zillion things I would've expected to find in space after the assimilation of Earth, whatever-the-fuck-her-name-was wouldn't even have been _close _to being on it. No offense to her (as a person – or an animal, or whatever – I had nothing against her, but as MY DAUGHTER WITH ZIM I really needed her to not exist), but this was _not _helping me start this new chapter of my life out on the right foot.

I couldn't just _ignore_ her, after all. I wasn't going to be able to focus on anything else until I knew why the hell she was around in the first place—what the hell Zim thought he was doing jacking my DNA, and popping out hybrids like frickin' toaster waffles.

So I let Gaz implant me with her weird Irken technology (I was far from thrilled about her sticking me with a pak, but I didn't want to end up turning into a fish-monster because I ate the wrong kind of alien fruit or something), and I took a cruiser out to look for Zim. Never mind that I had absolutely no idea where he was, or even if he was still alive.

Never mind that when I wasn't muttering to myself about how cramped these stupid Irken cruisers were, I was trying to convince myself that I _wasn't _just going after Zim because after twenty-two years, I didn't know how to do anything else. Because he was the only familiar thing I had to hold on to, even if I did hate him. Because we were sort of in the same boat.

Yeah. Never mind all that. I was on a mission.

So there I was, a thirty-three-year-old dude wedged into the cockpit of an Irken cruiser zipping all around God knows where on a wild goose chase, which was either progress or a new low depending on how you look at it. I'm not going to regale you with the details of the months I spent tracking down various bogus leads and dead ends, because honestly they're pretty boring. I'll just pick up at the point where I had finally grabbed a branch and dragged myself out of the quicksand that was failure, constantly threatening to liquefy the ground beneath my feet.

I'd followed a tip to a planet the cruiser's computer said was called Rax, which turned out to be more like a giant junkyard than anything resembling a planet. A mutant-millipede-looking guy a few planets over had said he'd heard rumors of Irken activity in the northeastern sector, and the cruiser's database wasn't coming up with any registered operations, so I touched down and headed out on foot.

Of course, I didn't have any of my equipment from home, nor was I familiar (or eager to get familiar) with Irken tracking technology. So even _with_ a lead, it was—well, let's just say it was slow going.

Until I was poking around a narrow alleyway between two strips of crumbling row houses (or what looked like row houses, anyway), weaving through drifts of rubble and tufts of tall blue grass the texture of cotton candy. The houses were uninhabited, like the rest of the planet from what I could see. Glancing through smashed windows and doorless archways, I saw only eight-legged rats darting between cracks in the walls.

Then, what I had taken for tinnitus – a distant, high-pitched ringing in my ears, resistant to my attempts to dislodge it with my little finger – exploded into a rapidly-traveling shriek, shooting up the strip of row houses on my right. I stuck my head through the nearest window just in time to see Zim's robot sidekick burst through the far wall, scattering dilapidated bricks and chunks of mortar.

He lunged to grab a rat skittering by, stuffed it into a hotdog bun, squirted it with a squiggle of mustard, and shoved the whole thing into his mouth. Chomping gleefully, spraying crumbs and rat guts everywhere, he glanced around the room and finally noticed me, staring at him from the window.

"Hi there!" he said, apparently unsurprised, waving one arm in a frenzied semblance of a wave. "Want some pie?"

"Uh—no thanks." Trying to blink my wits back, I scratched my head and shrugged, saying under my breath, "Well, what do you know? I guess that guy was right."

"Heeey," said the robot, as if it he were just realizing it now, "you're Master's friend! Did you come over to play?"

I snorted. "You could say that."

"Woo-hoo! He's gonna be so _happy_!" He pumped his fist in the air, then became suddenly sad, his eyes halving as he shook his head. "We don't have any friends here. Now that we's fugitees, we's all alone, plus there's no pancakes. I can't even write to my pen pals no more."

"Um—I'm sorry?"

"Okay, well, let's go see Master! I'll get the piñata!"

Firing up the jets in his legs, he rocketed through the next wall with a _boom_ and a great rumbling of brick. I withdrew my head from the window, slipped in through an archway, and found myself staring down a long corridor of holes blasted in receding walls, like the infinite reflections in parallel mirrors.

I followed the tunnel through what seemed like a thousand rooms, each another decaying dwelling in the strip. Eventually, I could hear the little robot babbling a few rooms away, and Zim snapping at him in answer. I climbed through a few more holes, stepping over the shards of brick jutting up like stalagmites, and there they were.

In a box-shaped room in the middle of the row, no bigger than my old kitchen, stood Zim and GIR yammering at each other. Zim's cruiser was parked in one corner of the room, a bunch of miscellaneous Irken paraphernalia spread out in the other. If you ignored the fact that I was in my thirties, and we were on a ghost planet a thousand light-years from Earth, and I was there to grill Zim about a teenage girl with our genes battling it out inside her, I could've been eleven years old again.

"Dib!" Zim barked when he saw me, then paused and blinked, bewildered. Like he'd forgotten I wasn't supposed to be there at first. "What on Irk are _you_ doing here?"

"Well, I—"

"How did you even _get _here? I thought you'd be sorting Irken screws by now." His eyes narrowed, then widened, and he popped out his spider-legs and stalked over to me. Extending one of the limbs towards my shoulder, he spun me around, then spluttered and gasped, demanding, "And how did you get a pak?!"

"Uh, my sister gave me one," I said, shrugging him off and turning back around. "We've been over this, remember? You _must_ remember," I added smugly, "because judging by the fact that you're, you know, _alive_, you took me a lot more seriously than you let on."

Zim frowned. "I didn't leave because _you_ told me to, Earth slime. I figured out Tak's plan by myself, just like I did the first time." He snorted, muttering, "She thinks she's so clever."

Retracting his spider-legs, he marched over to dig through his pile of red and purple gadgets stamped with the Irken insignia. What he was looking for, I didn't know, and I wasn't convinced he knew, either. "Nice place you've got here," I said dryly, glancing up at the ceiling of the little room. One corner was punched out and through it I could see the Raxian sky, murky with lavender clouds. "I guess this is what you'd call a fixer-upper?"

"For your information, Dib-worm," he sneered, "I'm only _here _because—"

"—because we're afraid of Tak," GIR chirped, and scampering out a hole in one wall in pursuit of what looked like an eel with wings.

"I am _not_!" Zim shouted, whipping around to glower at GIR before he realized he was gone. "Ridiculous," he grumbled as he turned back to brood over his widgets. "ME, the amazing ZIM, _afraid_ of that overgrown beanstalk? Never! I'm no more afraid of Tak than I am of my own shadow."

He blinked, shrieked, and swiped at something flickering on the floor next to him, before figuring out that it was, in fact, his shadow. "Anyway," he sniffed, recovering quickly, "I'm not _staying_ here. Not for good. I just need time to formulate my latest BRILLIANT plan, and _then_ I'll get rid of Tak and put the Empire back the way it's _supposed_ to be."

"Uh-huh. Well, good luck with that, Zim."

"I don't need your _luck_, filthy stink beast. I AM ZIM!"

He picked up something that looked like an Irken Frisbee, toyed with it a minute, then flung it back into the heap. "So what business is it you think you have here?" he snapped, as if he had something incredibly important to do and I was keeping him from it. "Whatever it is, take care of it and leave me alone. You're lucky I didn't fry your massive head the second you stuck it in here."

Right. I just had to think of a way to word it. "Actually, I'm here because I have a question to ask you. I found out—"

Suddenly, I was cut short and knocked down by what seemed like the sky falling. Actually, it was a chunk of the ceiling splintering and showering the floor with plaster, under the force of…_something _that had landed on top of it. The _thud_ and the ceiling's collapse happened simultaneously, so that I didn't understand what was going on until the dust cleared, parting in plumes around a figure in red and black.

It took me a minute to realize that it was J4, standing upright now, wearing a red jumpsuit—and—carrying a little pink-and-white shape on her shoulders, with ears that stuck up like a pig's. After a second, I recognized it as the SIR unit that had been in the room when Gaz took me to the vivarium, though I didn't know its name.

Or, you know, what the fuck either of them were doing there.

I scrambled to my feet, keeping behind them for the moment. "I can't believe this," Zim growled to himself, brushing the dust off his shirt. "First the walls, now the ceiling—you would think on a ghost planet, you'd be able to get some _privacy_!" He scowled up at J4 and the SIR unit. "And who exactly are _you_ supposed to be?"

I felt like Gaz must've felt that day in the vivarium, staring at him dumbfounded. "What, you don't know?"

J4 heard me and whirled around, glaring at me with her one red eye and the SIR unit's two pink eyes. It was weird, how the two of them seemed almost like one being, as if they not only moved but felt in unison. "Well, _that_ thing," Zim said contemptuously, flicking his eyes up at the SIR unit, "looks like GIR's stupid little friend from about a million years ago. What I don't know is what it's _riding_."

"This is actually what I was going to—"

"You will be silent." J4's voice cut through mine like a knife through tender meat, silencing me instantly. I'd never heard her speak before, but her voice – soft, silvery, even fragile though it was – had surprising power.

From a cuff on her left wrist emerged a bright red crescent of light, slicing through the air with a _snap._ She lifted it and turned to face Zim, advancing on him step by step, her boots leaving rusty red prints on the floor. He sprung up onto his spider-legs, snarling, firing a few shots at her from a pak-mounted laser; the air around her flickered, like an invisible force-field, and his shots bounced back to singe the wall above his head.

"And _you_," she said to him, "are going to tell _me_ who I am."

She held the blade so close to his throat that it threw red light over his face, and spoke such that each word sounded separate from the rest. _Who. I. Am. _I stood stock-still behind her, awaiting Zim's answer.

He just stared at her for a moment, coming up empty. Then, his brow furrowed, and I saw his eyes slit as he inspected her more closely. I saw a new light come over his face – not the red glow of the laser-blade, but the light of recognition, of remembering, and just as soon the darkness of wanting to forget.

His whole face bunched up like he'd smelled something rotten. "Oh, you can't be _serious_," he said, with a frustrated, digusted groan. "Can't GIR do _anything_ right?"

"So you _do_ know who she is," I said.

"Yes, I know what this _thing_ is. Do you want to hear the story? You'll probably enjoy it, since you always love ruining my plans."

_I had come up with a pretty incredible plan. I mean, not that all of my plans weren't incredible – they were, but this one especially so._

_After one too many afternoons spent dashing around the base trying to attend to a thousand things at once, only to end up with the roboparents adopting a human larva and a brain parasite attached to my head, I finally decided that a moronic SIR unit and a snarky computer weren't enough to assist me in my conquest of Earth. I needed a new sidekick, someone I could really depend on this time. Someone as smart as me._

_The thing was, there was really no one as smart as me, except for—well, me. So I realized what I had to do. If I just _cloned_ myself, I would have twice the ZIM brilliance to put into my plans, and twice the hideous DOOM to unleash upon the humans! All this time, I'd been putting my trust in inferior beings, but who better to help me then me? It was the best idea I'd ever had, or at least my best idea since Tuesday. _

_So of course, that beastly Dib creature had to go and ruin it._

_I got to work in the lab right away, preparing the nutrient solution and the gestation tank. And I'm down there one day ready to the initiate the process, about to scrape my DNA onto a slide and click it into the slot, when I hear a weird noise coming from somewhere up above me. Sort of like a scratching, then a thumping, then a clanking—then, silence. _

_I pause and listen for a moment, but nothing happens. So I turn my attention back to my project, and extract the precious Zim genes from my amazing Zim head. _

_Until, all of a sudden, who should come bursting out of a hatch in the ceiling but _Dib_—that filthy, squirmy Dib, clutching a pathetic piece of human recording technology and yelling something about how he's got me this time. The details of what ensued are inconsequential, save that naturally, I prevailed. I chased him out of the base with his jacket singed and his camera in pieces on the floor of my lab, no closer to 'getting' me than he was when we first had the displeasure of meeting. Because I'm good like that._

_I adjusted my security systems and didn't think about it again, because why should I have? I had no reason to believe that the Earth rat had done anything but take me away from my work for a short time. It wasn't until much later – about four months later, the average Irken incubation period – that I found out what had gone wrong._

_Picture this. I go down into the lab, thinking I'm going to unveil my beautiful creation, and what do I see when the panels retract but—I can't even describe it. It's so ugly I almost vomit right there. It definitely_ isn't_ Irken, that much I know right away, but it's not completely human, either._

_It's this wrinkly, shriveled-up ball of human flesh, with a black shock of human hair, and little wisps of antennae floating in the fluid. I recoil, gagging, ordering the computer to scan the thing and figure out what went so horribly _wrong.

_It turns out that when Dib infiltrated the base that day, he must have shed some skin or hair or something (constantly molting—disgusting humans), in exactly the worst possible place at exactly the worst possible time. It's an almost unbelievable coincidence, but given that it's Dib, I believe it. _

_He ruins everything; it stands to reason he'd find a way to ruin this, too. With his vile human genes contaminating the slide, the tank switched modes to create a genetic combination instead of a genetic copy, and spawned this _revolting_ creature instead of my clone. _

_"GIR!" I drain the solution from the tank and pick the thing up with a pair of tongs, holding it as far from my body as I can. When it opens its eyes, I can see that they're Irken eyes, bright red—but misplaced in this monstrosity's face. Against human skin, they look like great swollen boils, and I feel the bile rise again in my throat._

_GIR appears and salutes, his eyes flashing briefly red. "Yes, master?"_

_"Take this—ugh, this _thing _and throw it into the incinerator. I can't look at it long enough to carry it that far."_

_"Okay!" I release the tongs' grip, dropping it into his arms. "HI BABY!" he shrieks into its face, and capers off to the incinerator._

"At least, I _thought_ he was going to the incinerator. I guess I should've been suspicious when he didn't come back until three hours later, reeking of Krazy Taco. That empty-headed little cow pie must've gone out and dropped it in a gutter or something—which actually wouldn't have been a problem, if it hadn't somehow _survived and shown up here_, and wasn't CRASHING THROUGH MY CEILING LIKE A SPLUNKING ASTEROID!"

J4 stood motionless, wordless, though I couldn't see her face to tell if there was a reaction there. I hadn't expected to, but personally, I felt a little better about the whole thing – even somewhat pleased with myself, retrospectively. If I had to get stuck with one or the other, I'd rather it be our kid than his clone.

"You want to know what you are?" Zim said snidely, deliberately ignoring that she'd said _who_. "You're a failed experiment. You're an embarrassment and a mistake. You were never supposed to exist, and you'd be doing the universe a favor if you rectified GIR's error and dropped dead right now. Happy?"

Still, J4 did nothing. Zim was looking at her like she was a bucket that had sprung a leak – with the bored, half-hearted contempt one reserves for something defective, something broken and too meaningless to warrant fixing – and I couldn't help but feel a stab of sympathy, much as I wished I didn't. No matter who you are, it's got to be a slap in the face hearing something like that.

"Sheesh," I muttered. "A little harsh, Zim."

"What? You have feelings for this _thing_?"

"_No_, it's just that—that—"

I couldn't think of how to end the sentence, but it turned out it didn't matter anyway. As I fumbled, the line of J4's shoulders began to quiver. First it looked as if she were crying – as if she might collapse right there into a crumpled heap of dark hair and gangly red limbs – and then as if she were angry. I saw her back twitch and tense with the tightness of rage, the blade flash as she brandished it—moved to strike—and then—

"BR-BRDR-BR!"

With a cry like the clarion of an out-of-tune trumpet, GIR smashed through the last intact wall in the room, making his entrance in a spray of brick dust. In one fist, dangling by its tail, he held the flying eel, squirming and hissing and beating its wings.

"I got the salsa!" he shrieked, waving it in the air. For a second, we all stared at him, having briefly forgotten the intergalactic soap opera going on around us. But when it seemed the diversion had passed – when we were collectively returning to our senses – GIR's gaze zeroed in on the thing on J4's shoulders, and his eyes lit up. "PIGI!"

The other SIR unit's head whipped around so fast I thought it might come unscrewed from its neck. Until then, I'd thought that for a two-foot-tall robot wearing a helmet with pig ears, it managed to keep a remarkably straight face. If _I _were going on a murderous rampage/quest for purpose, it wouldn't be my first choice of companion, but it seemed as serious about the whole thing as J4.

When it registered GIR, that changed. A spasm of electricity crackled around its helmet, shaking its whole body. The cables zigzagging between the back of its head and J4's upper body _whoosh_ed back all at once, and it leapt, bright-eyed and grinning, to the floor.

"GIR!" it squealed, and in the background, Zim groaned.

"PIGI!" GIR screeched again. Looking the other SIR – PIGI, I gathered – up and down, he added, "You got a hat!"

"I know!" It cocked its head at the eel. "You got the salsa!"

"I _know_!" Without seeming to need to think about it, GIR chucked the eel at PIGI and rocketed back through the wall in a burst of manic laughter, yelling behind him, "TAG! YOU'RE IT!"

"FINDERS KEEPERS LOSERS MASHED POTATOES!"

In a blaze of pink flame, PIGI jetted after him, leaving the hole in the wall whistling empty and the three of us to figure out what to do. Me, confused as fuck, Zim shaking his head, and J4 staring at the hole through which her little helper had left. Just standing there, her face paper-white, the arc of light at her wrist flickering out as her arm fell limp at her side.

She sort of went limp all over, like PIGI had been a puppeteer holding her strings. Her knees had begun to gravitate towards each other, like she couldn't hold up her own weight, and each breath she drew was shorter, quicker, fluttering more frantically in her chest. I noticed that her face was wet, with twin ribbons of tears shining in the light; whether they'd escaped just now or before, after what Zim told her, I couldn't tell.

Less than five seconds after PIGI had gone, a red laser beam _zing_ed through the air and startled us both, catching me by surprise and J4 in her sewn-shut eyelid. She made a noise – just a soft, choked-back _unh, _not the scream you'd expect from someone who's just been hit with a laser – and clapped her hand to her eye.

I could just see the blood swelling between her fingers, red on red (I'd seen a thousand scars under her jumpsuit, but I'd never seen her bleed before, and realizing that her blood was red did something weird to me; somehow, even more than her skin and her hair, it made her seem painfully _human_), when she swayed and staggered, and fell.

"Shit!" I winced when she hit the ground face-first, a pool of blood slowly forming around her head. Glancing at Zim, I saw him smirk as he retracted his pak-mounted laser, and popped his spider-legs back into their ports. "Jeez, Zim. Did you really have to shoot her?"

"You fail to grasp the appropriate question for this situation, Dib-monkey. The question isn't _did I have to shoot it, _it's _do I have to shoot it again?_" He came over to inspect J4's unmoving body, nudging at her shoulder with his boot. "Is it still alive? I'm not taking any chances with this happening again."

"Oh, come on. You don't—you're not really going to _kill _her, are you?"

"Have I not made clear the intentions of Zim?" He narrowed one eye and widened the other, regarding me skeptically. "You see some reason _not _to be rid of this insult to Irken biotechnology?"

"I'm just saying, do you have to kick her while she's down? It's pretty obvious she's not a threat to anybody. Why don't you just..."

I paused and sighed, knowing what I was setting myself up for. Why bother going to the trouble of saving J4 from Zim, when my life would be a lot easier if she weren't around? Well. Why bother spending my whole life trying to save humanity from Irken assimilation, when my life on Earth was probably no better than it would have been in an Irken barracks?

"Why don't you just let me take her back to the Massive?" I finished. "We'll make sure she doesn't come after you again."

Zim stared at me like I'd grown a second head which also happened to be a chicken. "Humans," he said derisively, backing away from J4. "If I sprinkled a little of your DNA on a cupcake, you'd be wanting to snuggle up to that, too. Do whatever you want with it, Dib-weasel, but I'd better not see it again."

"Don't worry. You won't."

He headed over to his cruiser and its windshield slid back, letting him hop into the cockpit. "GIR!" he barked, and a moment later, GIR's head popped through the hole in the wall.

"Yes, my most-feared prince of DOOM?!" he shouted, his eyes glowing red.

"We're getting out of here for awhile. Get in." GIR jumped into the cruiser beside Zim, and the windshield _whish_ed shut over them both.

There were no parting remarks as the ship's engine warmed, no final threats or jabs. Zim just glared at us through the windshield, me and J4 bleeding beside me, then took off through the hole she'd made in the ceiling. Within seconds, his cruiser was nothing but a sparkle in the sky.

Before I could start wondering what the fuck I was going to _do_, another head appeared through the gap in the bricks. This time, it was PIGI's. Without GIR around, it (_she_, maybe? I would guess it was a she, since it was, you know, overwhelmingly pink, but I was hesitant to assume) approached J4 as deadly serious as before, horror on its face and in its voice.

"Oh, no." Tears pooled in its eyes and ran down its face. "What did he…w-what have I…"

It sank to its knees beside J4, pushing her over onto her back as gently as I imagined it could. A scarlet crater punched through her face where her left eye had been, like a big red flower with a deep, wet funnel, and long petals trailing across her face.

Inside the wound, blood bubbled up and spread in glistening rivulets, though not as much of it now. The first gush – the halo I'd watched growing around her head – was stamped in a lacelike pattern across her forehead and cheeks, where she'd lain with her face pressed into it.

"I didn't mean to," PIGI was babbling, half-sobbing – to me or J4, I wasn't sure. "I couldn't help it. I didn't—I wasn't—I—I—"

"She'll probably be fine," I said, more than a little uneasily. I wasn't used to having to comfort people, much less alien robots. "I mean, she wasn't using that eye anyway, right?"

It didn't seem to have heard me. So I scratched my head, and glanced around the room, and eventually decided I had better just go and get my cruiser, because I'd said I was going to bring J4 back to the Massive and because—well, because the alternative was standing there in the ruins of a strip of alien row houses, staring at my unconscious half-Irken offspring, and watching to her bipolar robot sidekick have a meltdown.

You know. Just another day.


	43. Of the Flesh

Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" + way too long spent poring over angsty Once-ler Tumblrs = ALL THE FEELS

**42. Of the Flesh**

I stood in the antechamber outside of the vivarium, Gaz beside me, PI (so I'd learned she was called) slumped over on her stool next to the doors. Behind the glass wall, J4 lay asleep on the floor, looking no worse for the wear than a length of white gauze wrapped around her head over her left eye. Still, the mood in the antechamber was almost funereal, not least because PI had been sniffling all the way from Rax.

"Is—is she going to be okay?" she whispered to Gaz as she approached the glass wall, looking about as solemn as a SIR unit with pig ears possibly could.

"Oh, sure. It's not as bad as it looked. Sometimes it's the minor wounds that bleed the most."

Gaz looked in through the glass at J4, who actually looked slightly less disturbing with gauze covering her left eye than she had with stitches closing it. "That eye wasn't working anyway, so all Zim really did was damage dead tissue. When she finally comes around to letting us rebuild her, we'll just pop in a new one."

PI didn't look especially comforted. She hung her head and stared at her feet, eyes drooping; I wouldn't have been surprised to see the pig ears on her helmet flop over in despair. "I want to—apologize for my behavior, Commander Gaz," she said softly, without looking up. "I was disobedient and foolish. You told me to wait, but I didn't listen—and now—"

As PI choked up, Gaz sighed. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not a big deal."

"But it_ is_ a big deal. I did this so she could get justice and closure, and all she has is blood on her hands and the knowledge that she was never wanted." She shook her head furiously, as if she could erase the past few days as easily as you'd erase an Etch-a-Sketch.

"No one should have to hear what he said to her, Commander Gaz. He called her a _monster_, a—a mistake – if he'd gotten his way, she'd have been dead five minutes out of the tank! And because of _me_—because I failed when she needed me, we didn't even get to get him back."

"Yeah, well, that's the thing about Zim. He pulls all kinds of dick moves, and never seems to have to answer for them. I've always figured just being Zim is punishment enough." Gaz dismissed the issue with a wave of her hand.

"But seriously," she added, "quit flipping out. What happened happened; you can't change it now. Of course, you might have to explain to Tak about the fourteen-person dent in her labor force, but she'll probably just slap you with a sentence of lifetime vivarium duty."

Gaz's cavalier attitude didn't amuse PI. She just stood there with her eyes glued to the floor, sagging all over, like she might just rust and fall to pieces there in the antechamber. "Listen," Gaz tried again after a minute, lowering herself to her haunches to look PI in the eyes. "She's not going to hold it against you. If she understands as much as you think she does, she'll understand you were only trying to help."

"I wouldn't blame her if she didn't," PI mumbled to the floor. "Because of my foolishness, she'll live the rest of her life knowing she wasn't meant for this world. That nobody ever loved her, or even _cared_ about her—that she was never valued as anything more than a lab rat. She'd have been better off never knowing where she came from than knowing that."

"Well, you care about her, don't you?"

PI's head snapped up and she blinked at Gaz, looking almost confused. "What?"

"_You_ care about her, PI. And isn't she better off knowing someone cares about her enough to _want_ her to have justice and closure, even if it wasn't what either of you were hoping for?"

Gaz smiled. "So now you know, right? You were itching to do it and you did it, and now you know it's not magic. Revenge is great, don't get me wrong, but in a case like this, it doesn't fix anything. It's like I said: what happened happened. Is she going to spend the rest of her life moping about how nobody ever loved her, or being happy that now somebody does?"

PI swallowed. "With all due respect, Commander Gaz," she said, "I'm not _somebody_."

"Yeah, so? Neither was I, til I tapped some Irken ass. Somebodiness is relative, Commander PI." Gaz straightened up and lifted her chin in the direction of the corridor, adding, "Now why don't you go grab a mug of _feeya_? I think she'll be waking up soon."

With a nod, PI was on her way, and Gaz and I turned our attention back to the vivarium. She'd been right: for the first time in several hours, J4 was stirring in her sleep, not quite waking but close to it. All the way back to the Massive, she'd been eerily still, sprawled limp and barely breathing in the cabin of the cruiser. Now, she shifted and rolled over on the spongy floor of the vivarium, her antenna flicking like a dreaming dog's ears.

"So what are you going to do?" Gaz said after a minute.

I raised an eyebrow. "About what?"

"About J4." She crossed her arms and rested her hip against the console, regarding me expectantly. "Are you going to claim her? Is that what you meant to say by bringing her back here?"

"_Claim_ her?" I said, bristling at her choice of words. "What do you mean, claim her? She's not a suitcase, Gaz."

"I _mean_, you wanted to know why she's around, and now you do. You know she was a mistake - not sure what else she could've been, but there you have it – and Zim's not interested in her; it's up to you to decide if _you_ are." She unfolded one arm to gesture towards the glass wall. "She's your kid. Do you care?"

I'd never thought about it in such straightforward terms. "Well, I kind of have to, don't I?"

"Zim doesn't."

"Yeah, but Zim's a dick."

"Very true. But it's not just that." For a moment, she paused, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. PI came back with a steaming mug in hand, and slipped into the vivarium to sit by J4, waiting for her to wake to the smell of the sweet drink they called _feeya._

"Do you understand what a battle it's been," Gaz began again, "just trying to get Tak to see Vix as more than a _larva_? On Earth, we had standards for how parents were supposed to treat their children, things like the 'maternal instinct' and 'unconditional love'; things like that don't exist here. Tak's grown fond of Vix, sure, but that sentiment is anything but _unconditional. _Vix has always been very aware that she has to earn Tak's regard like she'll never have to earn mine, because I'm conditioned to love her in a way Tak never was.

"The thing is, Irkens haven't borne or raised their own offspring for _thousands _of years. Parenting isn't a part of their culture, and neither are the responsibilities humans attach to it. The notion of being beholden to someone just because they share some of your DNA is ridiculous to them.

"That's why Vix is constantly having to prove her worth to Tak: she doesn't look at her and see someone she's obligated to, someone she _has_ to love no matter what. Vix sinks or swims with her on her own merits, like anybody else would. Tak doesn't know how to relate to her any other way."

I snorted faintly. "I'm almost afraid to find out where this is going. Are you actually trying to convince me _not_ to blame Zim for being a jerk?"

Gaz rolled her eyes. "Believe me, I'd be more than happy to blame you both for everything that's ever gone wrong in the universe – why stop at J4? I'm just saying…"

She tapped her fingernails rhythmically on the edge of the console, pausing again to think. "There's a word in the Irken language – _isha._ Actually, the whole word is _ishanaglafloogh, _but—well, you can probably tell why they shorten it.

"It's best translated as _of-the-body, _or _of-the-flesh. _See, when Irken young are engineered, their genetic material comes from samples taken from previous generations. It's a genetic potluck, basically, and most of the time nobody notices or cares to notice if one of the billions of little green nubs swarming around him happens to share the shape of his head. But when a genetic link _is_ identified, it's called _isha_: of the flesh."

I frowned. "Okay. I thought the whole point of this speech was to convince me that they don't care who's related to them."

"And they don't. Being _isha_ isn't a good thing. I mean, it's not a _bad _thing—it's not like you're insulting somebody by saying they're _isha_ to you, but it's not a term of endearment, and it doesn't signify a bond. It's more like calling someone your acquaintance. Of all Irken designations, it's probably the one that actually _means_ the least."

She lifted her eyebrows pointedly. "What I'm _saying _is, Toto, we're not on Earth anymore. No one is going to think less of you for deciding to wash your hands of J4. You and Zim are both free to choose what you want to be to her, and clearly, she's_ isha _to him. She could be the same to you."

"Well, maybe that's not what I want."

"Maybe it's not. Maybe you want to be like I am with Vix, and cling to primitive human conventions in the face of Irken skepticism. Maybe you want to make the effort – and as I'm sure you know, it will be an _effort_ – to be more than just the skin flake that made J4 possible." She shrugged. "Personally, I don't give a fuck."

"How helpful."

"I do want to make sure you know this, though – it's one or the other. It's been great not having to deal with your moping these past couple of months, and now that you're back, I want to make sure you know that the Massive is no longer your personal limbo. You can stick around and help PI with J4, or you can take the cruiser and disappear, but you're not slouching around here in your slippers wondering what you're going to do with your life now that you can't hide in the bushes across from Zim's house all day. Clear?"

"Crystal, Commander Gaz," I said dryly, flicking my hand in a mock salute.

She grinned and clapped me on the back, hard enough to knock the wind out of me for a second. "You're catching on."

As she headed out into the corridor, I detached myself from the glass wall and caught her at the doors, wanting to give voice to a thought that had occurred to me while she was talking to PI. "You know, Gaz," I said, searching for the most palatable way of presenting something that was, in reality, almost intolerably sappy, "you seem…different.

"Not that I wouldn't have expected you to change in sixteen years—not that you weren't fine before—but you're kind of—_mature_ now, I guess is the word. More so than I thought you'd be." I flinched, instantly aware of all the ways she could take that wrong. "Please don't hit me."

To my surprise, she didn't. She just sort of shook her head, half-smiling, as if to tell me I didn't know the half of it. "Well, that's another thing about Irkens," she said. "They pretend to be bigshots, but they're all just a bunch of bratty kids. Somebody has to be the mature one around here."

Once she'd gone, I stood in the antechamber awhile longer, looking in at PI and J4. While Gaz and I had been talking, J4 had finally woken, and now she sat snuggled up to PI with the mug of _feeya_ in her hands. Clearly, Gaz had been right in saying she wouldn't hold a grudge, because she wasn't exactly spitting and hissing at PI.

They were the weirdest pair I thought anyone had ever seen – J4 festooned in scars and stitches like garlands, the Irken lines of her body colored in with human skin, and PI with her neon pink eyes and pig ears – and in that, they fit together perfectly. I had a feeling they'd have been a chaotic force to be reckoned with, had they first met in Zim's labs instead of the vivarium.

I thought about what Gaz had said. _Did_ I want to claim her? I couldn't just _ignore_ her, no more than I could've ignored Zim all those years on Earth. I couldn't pretend she didn't exist. But the longer I stood there, watching her, the more I realized that I had no place in her life. At least not right now.

She was terrified of humans, so much so that Gaz couldn't even go into the vivarium. I had no doubt she'd have killed me on Rax if she could have, once she'd dispatched Zim. I had no idea what she'd been through, and I was no trauma counselor; I couldn't have fixed her if she'd wanted me to. And she _didn't_ want me to, so far as I could tell. Maybe I had no business trying to shoehorn myself into her life, anyway. Maybe I was _isha_ to her.

I'm not sure how long I stood looking in at her, my daughter who was never really _mine._ Asking myself what I could call mine, anymore. Wondering if, had my life gone just a little differently, I might've been one of the people leaning over her with a scalpel, and if I would've hated myself had I known.


	44. Phases of the Moons

RKB: Well, sure she would. But who's to say she feels Vix could, should, or would even want to succeed her as Tallest? A society that doesn't recognize familial bonds isn't exactly a prime breeding ground for nepotism.

**43. Phases of the Moons**

Night on Rax was decorated with three moons, illuminating the alley between the row houses like bare bulbs hanging in a corridor. One, directly above me, shone bright white. Another, in a different part of the sky, was a crescent of grey. The third was smaller than the others and a violent shade of orange, almost red; I passed a cracked window and saw it reflected in dozens of jagged triangles of glass, like the spatter of blood after a slaughter.

The room in the center of the row glowed in the light of the white moon, flooding in through the hole J4 had left in the ceiling. Zim's cruiser was back in one corner of the room, and he was hunched over the heap of Irken techno-crap in the other, doing something with a blowtorch that sprouted from his pak. GIR was nowhere to be seen.

"Ugh, what now?" Zim groaned when I made my presence evident, rubble crunching beneath my feet as I entered through an empty archway. "If you keep coming back here, Dib-pig," he said, glaring at me over his shoulder, "one of these days that doorway is going to be electrified."

I wasn't especially worried. "Uh-huh."

"I mean it! I'll chop off your gigantic head and mount it on my wall!"

"Go ahead," I snorted. "This dump could use some decoration."

"Look," he snapped, retracting his blowtorch and extending his spider-legs, so that he could stalk over to me and shove his scowling face into mine, "unless you're here to fix the hole you made in my roof, I suggest you move your filthy human body of filthy—human—pork—meats as far away from ZIM as you possibly can, lest you suffer a wrath that will make you soil your sheets EVERY NIGHT UNTIL THE END OF NIGHTS!"

"What do you mean, 'the hole_ I_ made in your roof'? _I _didn't make that hole. J4 did."

He frowned. "What are you babbling about now, you stupid slice of Earth loaf? Who's J4?"

"The one who made the hole in your roof. Duh."

"That thing? Now you've given it a _name_?"

"_I_ didn't give her a name. My sister did."

"_Your sister," _he spat bitterly, curling his lip. "Presumptuous little swine. I'd rather not waste my breath discussing _your sister_."

With an almost wounded sniff, he backed away from me and returned to whatever he'd been working on, the spider-legs turning his stride into something between a prance and a lollop. "Well, whatever you call it, it's your fault that thing exists," he added, settling back down with his blowtorch, "so you might as well have made that hole."

"_My _fault?" I protested. "You're the one who made her!"

"What _I_ was making was a magnificent clone of my magnificent self. It was you and your disgusting desquamation that created the beast that ruined my roof."

He picked up a red sphere studded with rivets and flipped it open along a horizontal seam, revealing innards composed of circuitry that beeped and blinked with tiny pink lights. Digging into it with his blowtorch like you would a carton of lo mein with a pair of chopsticks, he said, "Anyway, if you _insist_ on plaguing me with your presence, plug your noise hole and be silent while I work. I can't very well come up with a plan to save the Empire from that self-important lamppost Tak with you yammering over my shoulder."

So for awhile, the only sound in the room was the _fshh_ of the blowtorch, and the occasional patter of rats' feet. Having spent the long commute back to Rax feeling like the cabbage in an eggroll, I was in no mood to sit down, so I wandered around within the confines of the four crumbling walls. Not that there was much to see, save a few clumps of blue grass sprouting from cracks in the cement floor, and Zim's cruiser squatting like a fat purple Buddha in one corner.

The view from the windows, with GIR-shaped holes punched in their panes, wasn't anything special, either. For all I'd always longed to travel the universe, I was finding out that there were certain planets that weren't worth visiting, and Rax was definitely one of them. There was nothing there but the hollowed-out carcasses of buildings, graveyards of scrap metal, long-downed ships.

"So why _are_ you here?" Zim finally said, unpleasantly as ever. "In case you haven't figured it out, there's no Earth left for me to take over, so what reason do you have for stinking up my encampment with your revolting Dib-stench?"

"I don't know." I sighed and flopped down against the wall that looked the least likely to cave in on me, tired of pacing the room. "Doesn't it seem weird, though? I mean, for _twenty-two years_ we've been chasing each other in circles, and now—I'm not sure what to _do._ I can't even remember what I _did_, before you showed up. I guess I never thought I would have to."

"Well, that's revoltingly sentimental of you," he sneered, "but I can't commiserate. For one thing, twenty-two years may be a substantial chunk of your pathetic human lifespan, but to me – me being superior to you in every way conceivable to your pitiful human brain, as well as in ways you could never hope to understand – they're as insignificant as human civilization is to the Irken Empire.

"For another thing, I always _knew_ the time would come when the Earth would fall to the Empire. Of course, I rightly assumed I would be heading the assimilation, instead of fighting VALIANTLY to free my people from whatever form of hypnosis Tak has employed to make them accept her as their leader—but I was never so reliant on _you_ as you were on me."

I shook my head. "You know what? I think you're just jealous of Tak."

Zim whipped his head around to glower at me. "_Jealous_? ZIM? Blasphemy! LIES!" He blinked, coughed and cleared his throat, amending, "Don't change the subject. You were telling me how utterly meaningless your life is without me, as are the lives of all who are not privileged enough to spend their days in the presence of Zim."

"Oh, come on. You can't tell me you didn't get at least a little bit used to me."

"Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth, Dib-rat?"

"Sure, I understand them. I just don't believe them." I leaned my head back against the wall, looking up at the pearly white moon in the center of the sky. "We've been through a lot together, Zim. We turned into bologna together. We got sucked into a nightmare world together. Fuck, we have a kid together."

"Allow me to correct your misperceptions._ I_ turned into bologna with you because you couldn't accept defeat; _you_ dragged me into your filthy head and tried to sacrifice me to the Halloweenies; it's not a _kid_, it's a monster."

Deciding to concede on all of his points but the last, I furrowed my brow, objecting, "Do you always have to say that? Even if you don't _like_ J4, you could still admit that she's—you know, a person."

"Yeah, and I could call that rat a person, too." A laser gun popped out of his pak and zapped a rat scurrying by, leaving it belly-up and smoking on the cement floor. "Have you even _looked_ at that thing? It's an abomination. There's a _reason_ Irkens don't taint our genes by combining them with those of lesser beings."

"Tak did. She and my sister have a daughter."

"Then Tak has committed a crime against nature and against the Empire. At least _I _have the decency to be ashamed of _your_ mistake."

The limb holding the blowtorch folded and slid back into its port, and Zim put down the red orb. Eyes narrowed to suspicious slivers, he stomped over to where I sat, demanding, "Is that why you're really here? Are you harboring the hideous illusion that you and I and that—that odious blight on the name of ZIM are going to become some kind of a _family_?"

"_No_, I—"

"Because in case your vile little sister, in her ongoing quest to turn herself Irken through sheer force of will, hasn't already explained this to you—we don't _do_ family." He drew the word out mockingly, _fam-i-ly._ "The existence of that creature does not obligate me to it nor to you, and I will lose my patience quickly if you insist on _talking_ about it all the time.

"Do you know what me losing my patience means, you insolent meat slab? It means _your_ ugly hide flayed and sent back to the Massive wrapped up with a bow, so that on the anniversary of the day I discovered you'd stuck your filthy foot into another one of my plans, that mongrel sewer rat can open it as a birthday present!"

"_Okay_. I get it. Don't get your antennae in a knot."

He returned to his makeshift workstation grumbling and muttering, but he didn't pick up the sphere again. Instead, he fished through his hoard until he came up with a sheet of scrap metal about the size of a pizza box, and marched over to a wall pockmarked with small gaps in the brick – just about the right size for eight-legged rats and flying eels.

Rising up to the height of the first hole on his spider-legs, he slapped the sheet of metal over it and extended an automatic screwdriver from his pak. I raised an eyebrow as I realized what he meant to do.

"That's not going to work, you know," I pointed out. "If you stick a screw in that wall, it'll cave in."

"You know nothing, Earth slime! Of _course _it'll work. Just—yaAAH!" He yelped and dodged a spray of brick chips as the first screw sent a fissure rippling upwards through the wall, a big chunk of brick coming dangerously close to dislodging and squashing him into the cement. I rolled my eyes.

"I should just let you get squished," I said, but instead I got up, and yanked the scrap metal off the screw it was dangling from. "You'd be better off plugging the holes instead of covering them. Here, like this."

In the center of the room, directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, sat a heap of cement shards – fallout from J4's big entrance. Picking out a fairly substantial block, I hoisted it up with two of the pak's limbs (I didn't like the thing, but it was stronger than ten of me; something told me that had I tried to lift that block myself, I'd have ended up with nothing but a couple of severed toes), held it out in front of me, and popped out a laser to cut it down to the right size and shape.

When it looked like I thought it ought to, I nudged it into the gap in the wall as carefully as I could. I sealed the cracks with a shot from the pak's bonding-laser (I still wasn't sure whether to be impressed by the fact that Irkens used lasers for _literally everything_, or to snort back laughter every time Gaz informed me of a new use for them), and looked at Zim smugly.

"Pff," he scoffed, turning up his—well, not his nose. "You didn't even really _do _that. Irken technology did."

"Yeah, well, I don't see yours doing it."

The only answer he could manage was a scowl.

Without quite meaning to, I ended up spending the next several minutes helping Zim plug the holes in the room, through which the vermin and the wind and the purple Raxian rain blew in from the grey plains. Not like I had anything better to do.

Besides (I told myself wryly), if I didn't, he'd probably jam a block in at the wrong angle, bring down the wall and crush himself, and _then_ I'd have no one to yell at me and append insults to my name. I mean, fuck. What a loss.

"So," he said awhile later as he cut a chunk of concrete, with a tone that implied he was about to ask if I had a bomb on me, "why didn't you _do_ anything?"

I blinked, confused. "What?"

"_Listen_ when Zim speaks, stupid deaf dirt clod. If you knew that simpering garden hose calling herself the Tallest was going to take over the Earth, why didn't you_ do_ something? Not that whatever pitiful resistance you could've mounted would've been more than a glob of bird droppings on the windshield of the Empire—even _Tak's_ empire—but you wasted pretty much your whole life trying to foil _my_ brilliant plans to rain horrible screaming doom down on the heads of your people, so—I thought you'd have at least _tried_."

"Yeah. I thought I would have, too."

I left it at that for a minute, while I slid another cut block of concrete into a hole in the wall. When it was sealed, I let my hands drop to my sides, and sighed. "I don't know. I guess I'd just had enough. Like you said, I wasted my whole life trying to save the Earth from you, and what did I get for it? Jack shit. I got everybody laughing at me, and calling me crazy, and my dad seeing me as a disappointment, and never having a real job or a house of my own or a kid who doesn't live in a glass tank.

"So I thought—why _should_ I try? My life would probably be better, if Tak assimilated the Earth – it sure as hell couldn't get much worse – and then at least I'd get to smirk at everyone who called me crazy. Then, at least, they would finally get what was coming to them, and as they spent their lives in Irken factories they'd wish they had listened to me."

Picking up another hunk of concrete, I turned it around a few times trying to decide where to cut it, then lopped off an edge that stuck out and schlepped it over to another hole. "Not like that worked out any better than anything else I've ever done. Now I kind of wish I'd stuck to my principles, even just so I could say I did.

"I mean, what does it matter now, if all of those people we went to school with know I was right? It doesn't help me. All I've got is knowing that the Earth fell and I didn't even try to stop it, that I wasted my whole life just to give up in the end—and if I were back on Earth with everybody else, they'd probably hate me for _that_."

Zim stared at me for a second, one eye widened, the other halved. "Well, aren't you pathetic?" he sniped, and skittered off on his spider-legs to grab some more concrete.

When the wall was patched (patched for the moment, anyway – I was sure that whenever GIR showed up, he'd remedy that in short order) I stood back and scratched my head, blinking up at the scalene triangle the moons formed in the sky.

"You know," I said, "there's really nothing for me to _do _on the Massive, at least not until J4 is ready to—uhh, receive visitors or whatever. Could you deal with me hanging out here for awhile?"

He sneered at me. "I'd rather chew nails."

"Good. I'll stay."


	45. Scene at a Birthday Party

Another timeskip! A new narrator! Callooh callay, the times, they are a-changin'!

**44. Scene at a Birthday Party**

_Five years later_

_Vix speaking_

I woke on the morning of my fifteenth birthday more excited than I thought I'd ever been. Well, it wasn't_ really_ morning—just what we called morning, since there's no morning in space. And it wasn't _really_ my fifteenth birthday.

If it was actually the anniversary of my birth, which Mom said was what birthdays were supposed to be, it was probably more like the ninth or the tenth, and there was a good chance it wasn't even that. Since nobody bothered to keep track of when I'd actually been extracted from my gestation tank, birthdays and birthday parties happened whenever I felt like being celebrated or someone felt like celebrating me. And we decided how old I was based on how old Mom thought I seemed – in this case, fifteen.

_Anyway_, I was at _least_ more excited than I'd been since the last time I had a birthday party, and I sprang out of bed the second my eyes opened. Sprang out of bed and got my foot caught in the blanket and ended up smacking face-first into the floor, yeah, but it didn't dampen my mood.

I scrambled up and over to my closet and grabbed a lavender dress with a short poofy skirt, and hopped around trying to shove my feet into striped tights, and buckled up my boots and bounded over to my vanity to tug a brush through my hair. Snapping a couple of elastics around a pair of low, long pigtails, I dashed to my doors and half-skipped, half-bounced down the corridor, weaving expertly around crew members going the other way.

I showed up at a bedroom down the hall from mine and jackhammered my fist into the door. "J4! Are you awake?"

Jiggling impatiently up and down, I pressed my ear to the seam between the doors, through which a soft voice filtered in response. "Yes, awake."

"Well, are you _coming_?"

"Yes, coming."

"Then come _now_!"

"Coming later. Be patient. Don't wait, go now. Catch you."

"Catch _up_."

"Catch up," she corrected herself, her voice growing louder and closer to my ear. I jumped back from the doors just before they slid open, on J4 standing there in her red tunic and matching leggings, looking at me knowingly. I had to admit, it was a lot easier to look back at her now that she'd let Mom fix her up. "Happy birthday," she said with a little smile.

"Thanks." I grinned and rocked back and forth on my heels, unable to keep still. "You _are _coming to my party, right? It's gonna start soon."

"Yes, coming to your party. Get ready first."

"What do you mean, get ready? You're dressed, aren't you? Come with me now!"

"No…" Her voice trailed off, and she raised a hand and swirled it vaguely at one side of her head. "Get ready."

I thought I understood what she meant. She didn't mind the crew, since they weren't human, but she was always awkward around them – awkward around anybody who wasn't me or PI, actually – and I got the feeling she liked to psyche herself up before stuff like this. "Oh. Okay." I remembered something Mom had told me a few days ago, and widened my eyes meaningfully at her. "Mom says Dib might come."

She scrunched up her face distastefully. "Ugh. Maybe not coming."

"Oh, come _on_. He's not coming to see _you_."

"Always coming to see me," she grumbled.

"Well, then," I teased, attempting to lighten the mood. "Aren't you just the most important person in the universe?"

"Not bragging," she said flatly. "Truth. Wish wasn't."

"He's not _that_ bad. I mean sure, he's weird, but it's not his fault that—uh—you know."

Her eyes narrowed and her antennae flattened against her head, as ever unswayed. "Human. Is enough."

I sighed. "Well, _I'm_ not human, so you can't not come to my party. Avoid Dib, if you hate him that much. I'm sure PI will run interference for you."

"Coming, Vix," she assured me. "Don't worry."

She turned, the doors _click_ed shut, and I scooted off down the hall, humming 'Down by the Bay' with rhythmic boot-clacks substituting for hand-slaps. The party today was on the main deck, where I found a smattering of the crew frowning at the balloons that cluttered their workstations, and ducking beneath the low-hanging swags of streamers obscuring their control panels.

With a few tight-lipped smiles and muttered apologies, I waded through them to where Mimi sat on a console, inflating balloons stamped with Mum's insignia with the helium nozzle in her head. "Hey, Mimi!"

I clambered up onto the console beside her, scooching back to sit with my back against the wall and my feet swinging in the air. Picking up a pink balloon and batting it from hand to hand, I took a second to organize my thoughts into a sentence (like I always had to, after I talked to J4, and found myself unconsciously slipping into her weird, stilted way of speaking), then turned again to Mimi.

"You haven't seen my parents yet today, have you?"

Mimi shook her head, then paused and looked up, glancing around the wide red plane of the deck. After a second, she nodded in the direction of one of the corridors, and I heard the faint strains of conversation slowly moving up it. "All I'm saying is that you could stand to develop a sense of _decorum_, child," came Mum's voice, stiff with displeasure. "Which, in this case, means_ not_ calling the Tharlian emperor a _web-footed space cow_ while I'm trying to negotiate a treaty with him!"

Right. I remembered they'd had a videoconference this morning (which, judging by the sound of things, hadn't gone especially well), conducting some business I was still young enough not to have to understand. "You know it's what you were thinking," I heard Mom answer.

"It doesn't matter what I was _thinking._ In civilized societies, we generally try to keep each other sane by _not_ always saying what we're thinking." Mum sighed. "Forgive me for having assumed you already knew that."

"Yeah, well. You know what they say about assuming, Sticky."

"Actually, I don't."

"Good. Neither do I."

When they finally stepped out onto the deck, I waved, and they came over to where Mimi and I were sitting. "'Sup?" Mom addressed us both, hitching her chin in greeting. "Ready for the festivities?"

"_More _than ready," I enthused. "People better start getting here soon."

"Patience, grasshopper," she said, even though I'd already heard the first part from J4, and had no idea what a 'grasshopper' was. "They'll get here when they get here. In the meantime," she added, climbing up onto the console with Mimi and I, "I'm just glad to have the rest of the day off."

"Ha!" Mum muttered, swiping at a bundle of balloons' strings that had been unfortunate enough to get in her way. "The day off. I haven't had a day off in twenty years." She tapped a control panel to wake it up and began flipping restlessly through a series of screens, as if there were some urgent business she absolutely _had_ to attend to before the party started.

"I don't understand why we have to bring the entire Empire grinding to a screeching halt every time we do these things," she said, almost to herself. "To think of all the worthwhile things I could be doing—instead of standing around choking on balloons—"

Mom reached out and grabbed her by the wrist, jerking her away from the control panel. "Would it kill you to be cheerful?" she said, sounding pleasant enough, but nailing Mum with a warning glance. "I mean, if you're going to be a total dick about it, you're welcome to go stew in a closet while Vix has her birthday party, but I think it'd be more fun if you stuck around."

Mum frowned, then dropped her eyes to the floor, releasing her breath in a short huff. When she looked back up, I could tell she'd made a concentrated effort not to scowl, if not exactly to smile, and I appreciated it. "Well, at least I'm sure you'll like your present," she said to me by way of apology. "You ought to, anyway."

Soon, my guests started showing up, pulling into the docking bay and joining us on the main deck ushered by a crew member specially dispensed for the task. My parties were populated by friends I'd made on our journeys throughout the universe, from the colonies and conquered worlds where Mum would give speeches and chair meetings, while I was sent touring with an escort.

Mostly they were Irken, but I had a few friends from the enslaved races – always dethroned royalty, or higher-ups from the courts of dethroned royalty. They were sometimes treated a little nicer than the others, and so didn't necessarily hate me on principle. None of them, of course, were human.

Now that I was older, Mom would sometimes take me with her on counter-resistance missions, and her fleet liked me well enough. They came, and so did some of Mum's councillors and ministers, who would never pass up the chance for free doughnuts and slushies and the chance to further ingratiate themselves with her, especially since performance reviews were coming up soon.

In fact, a lot of people who weren't my friends vied for an invitation just so they could snuggle up to Mum. I didn't mind, since a party is always more fun when there are more people. Like Mom had said he would, Dib came, as did Rel, as did J4, with PI on her shoulders playing lookout, in case Dib should sidle over to her and attempt to initiate the most awkward conversation since my parents sat me down to explain hybrid puberty.

So we slurped slushies, and picked doughnuts off of huge pyramids stacked on hoverdiscs, and played whatever Earth party game Mom was recommending this time. I milled about chatting with everybody and being wished a happy birthday. Then – when the hoverdiscs were coated in crumbs, and my boots had had enough of being kissed, and we'd smacked a paper effigy of an animal until it burst and vomited candy – it was time for presents.

I already had everything I could've wanted, and I didn't need to have a birthday to get more. Like J4 said, _not bragging, truth_; it was just one of the things about my mum being the Almighty Tallest. She and Mom were the only ones I really expected a present from.

My friends would bring me things sometimes, and the people hoping to curry favor with Mum would present me with the most lavish gift they could afford (always glancing over their shoulders as they did, wanting to make sure she was watching), but I wasn't bothered if they didn't. The party was what I really looked forward to.

Still, it was always fun to see what my parents had come up with to give me, and this time it had been Mum's turn to arrange it. With the whole party congregated, forming an arc around us, she led me over to the big viewscreen in the wall. With the press of a button, a video feed of a recently-assimilated solar system came flickering to life.

"In celebration of your fifteenth birthday," Mum said, ostensibly to me, but with the grandeur characteristic of her much longer addresses for much larger crowds, "I present to you the royal title to the Empire's newest acquisition – as of now, the Thombra system, but soon to be officially renamed in your honor."

My guests cheered and applauded their approval (as they would have, I suspected, even if all she'd given me was a dirty sock), and I blinked at the viewscreen in amazement. I had to admit, Mum had really one-upped herself this time.

On birthdays past, she'd given me mines packed with precious jewels, companies of servants to lay down velvet cushions in the path of my every footstep, even an entire planet with my name lasered into its terrain—but never a solar system. Of course, I had no idea what I would _do_ with a solar system, but that was pretty much par for the course. The aim of Mum's presents was to be impressive, not useful.

She was standing there by the viewscreen looking terribly pleased with herself, waiting for me to express my gratitude. And I was about to, when I was interrupted by an incredulous snort from the inner edge of the arc, and Mom's voice cutting through the buzz of the crowd. "You've got to be kidding me."

Mum's self-satisfied smile immediately flattened into a frown. "What?"

"You're _giving_ her a _solar system_?" Mom said, not yet particularly confrontational, but disdainfully disbelieving. "That's your present? Are you _serious_?"

"Why shouldn't I be?"

Mom flashed her palms, shaking her head. "Hey, it was your turn to get her gift; far be it from me to tell you how to do it. I'm just saying, it seems like a bit—much."

"Well then, it seems to me as if you _are _trying to tell me how to do it. Would you care to explain exactly what your problem is with my celebrating Vix's birthday the way I see fit?"

Glancing at the crowd around her, Mom said, her voice clipped, "After the party."

"_Now_."

As if Mum had pulled a lever, everyone stopped talking. Up until then, everyone had still been chatting amongst themselves, mostly ignoring the first stirrings of the argument between my parents—maybe hoping they would die down, like I was, or maybe just not noticing at all. But when the image on the screen irised out, and Mum snapped _now_, and she closed the few feet between herself and Mom with sharp, stalking steps, silence swept the deck.

"If you're going to interrupt Vix's birthday party just to tell me you think I'm _wrong_," Mum growled an inch from Mom's face, as if oblivious to the arc of people watching her, "then you'd better believe you're going to explain yourself _now._ That, or rescind and apologize for your insult, so that we can all move on with our lives."

"Fine! You want me to explain? I'll explain." Mom flung an arm out towards the now-darkened viewscreen. "You gave her a fucking solar system, Tak! She's fifteen! What the hell is she going to _do_ with a solar system?"

A hushed _ooh_ rippled through the mass of onlookers – partly because of Mom's English expletives, which they didn't have to fully understand to know that they were outrageous, and partly because she'd called Mum by her name. After all, few people did anymore.

All of her subjects addressed her as _my Tallest, _or else prefaced her name with the title when referencing her to someone else, and of course I called her Mum. Even Mom nearly always called her _Sticky_, for some reason, except when she was really serious or really mad. This time, we all knew what it meant.

"Do you want me to _apologize_ for presenting her with a nice gift?" Mum demanded, ignoring the question Mom had actually asked. "_You're_ the only reason we go to the trouble of putting on these ridiculous human celebrations in the first place! All I'm doing is playing along!"

"Well, I'm pretty sure there was never a 'ridiculous human celebration' where someone gave the guest of honor a _solar system _as a birthday present! Did you even _think_ about something she might actually _like_, or did you just pick the most ludicrous, unnecessary thing you could think of and call it a gift?"

"You're the one who's always going on about me 'seeing Vix as more than a larva'—I mean, you've been _bullying_ me into displaying affection for her for ten years, and now that I do, you punish me for it with public humiliation!"

I sighed, wondering if they'd forgotten I was still standing there. My parents were great when they got along, but they fought often enough that I (and a good faction of the partygoers) could chart the stages of their arguments, and we knew that at this point there would be no talking them down; it had to run its course.

They would take turns saying horrible things, one of them would storm off, they'd ice each other out for the rest of the day and have made up by the morning. In the meantime, all we could do was stand there and watch: everyone else enjoying the spectacle, me resigning myself to being the weapon they had chosen to lash out with.

"Giving her extravagant gifts isn't _displaying affection_," Mom was snapping, "it's turning her into a spoiled brat! Is this the kind of person you want your daughter to turn out to be?"

"And what kind of person is that?"

"The kind of person who does nothing but sit around expecting to have galaxies dumped into her lap, because that was her mum's definition of _parenting_! The kind of person who's spoon-fed all her life, so that by the time she's twenty-five she needs help to sip a soda! You're going to turn around one day and she's going to be just like Red and Purple, and you'll be too blind to realize you've done it to her."

Mum looked at her like she'd just been slapped in the face, simultaneously wounded and enraged. Another scandalized murmur moved through the crowd. "What do you _want _from me, child?"

"All I _want _is for you to maybe put some damn thought into what you're doing here. Do you even know Vix well enough to get her something she would, I don't know, use? _Want_? Or are you too lazy to do anything but pick something off your list of conquests five minutes before the party?"

"_Lazy!_" Mum spat, and I flinched, because even I knew better than to call her lazy. "How dare you?! _I'm _the one who does all of the actual work around here; all _you_ have to do is one little job that_ I_ gave you in the first place! You'll have to excuse me for being too busy _running an empire _to sit around thinking up birthday presents!"

"Well, you wouldn't be running jack shit if it weren't for me!"

"Because _you_—" Mum stopped, colored, grit her teeth. "It doesn't matter what you did before. All you do _now_ is pressure me into enacting the meaningless rituals of a dead civilization, and then criticize me when I don't do it right!"

"And I guess my commanding your counter-resistance operations is _meaningless_ to you too, huh?"

"Did you suppose you were indispensable? There are a billion other people I could give your job, and they'd probably do it better than you."

Mom snorted. "You're lying through your teeth."

"Am I? At least somebody else would be less of a _weight around my neck_!"

"Fine. If I'm such a _burden_ to you, Tak, maybe I should relieve you of that weight."

"Maybe you should."

Mom, her eyes narrow and her shoulders stiff, jerked her head towards the crowd and shouted, "REL!"

Rel pushed her way through the hoarde of partygoers and skittered timidly to Mom's side, glancing between her and Mum with a look on her face that said she'd rather be anywhere else. "Convene the crew and warm up my ship's engines," Mom ordered, glowering at Mum as she spoke. "I can't stand this place another minute."

I could feel the blood slowly draining from my face. This wasn't part of the script. For the rest of the crowd, the prospect of Mom ditching the Armada was a hot piece of gossip, but for me, it was deeply worrying. In all the years they'd been fighting over this thing or that, neither of them had ever been angry enough to actually, physically _leave_.

"You're leaving?" Mum said, sounding as stunned as I was.

"Yeah." As Rel scurried off to do as she'd been told, Mom followed her, shoving Mum deliberately with her shoulder as if squeezing past her in a crowd. "You're welcome."

For a moment Mum stood, unspeaking, unmoving, as the _clack_ of Mom's boots rang out across the deck. Then, she whipped around suddenly, and yelled at her back, "That ship is mine! I built it and it's _my_ property, and you have no right to take it without my permission."

Mom stopped, but didn't turn around. Laughed – a short, hard, bitter laugh – but not as if anything was funny. "Yeah? This ship is yours, too. What do you expect me to do?"

At that, Mum seemed to shift in her skin, making an all-too-conscious switch from vulnerable to haughty. She folded her arms, lifted her chin, and sniffed, saying (in the voice she used to issue official decrees), "Well, what _does_ one do, when she's made herself an enemy of the Empire?"

The crowd began to whisper furiously amongst itself, knowing as well as I did that if Mum declared Mom an enemy of the Empire – no matter how hollow the judgment was, how akin to a child telling her parents she hates them for giving her a time-out, how akin to a girl dumping her boyfriend because he forgot to call – then an enemy of the Empire she was.

"You can fly a hundred light-years in any direction, child, and you'll still be in my territory. You'll still belong to me."

I saw the muscles under Mom's gown tense when she heard that, her hands balling into fists at her sides. She turned her head just long enough to glare at Mum over her shoulder. "I don't _belong _to anyone," she said, as viciously as I'd ever heard her say anything.

Mom whirled back around and strode from the deck, the only person in the whole of the Empire who would blatantly defy Mum's orders without a second thought. I knew she would leave no matter who tried to stop her, and so did Mum.

With an impotent, infuriated growl, she stalked off in the opposite direction, the tails and sleeves of her gown swirling in her wake like purple dustclouds, a train of partygoers breaking off and skittering obsequiously after her. I trudged over to the console where I'd been sitting earlier, smacked aside a cluster of slowly-deflating balloons, and hoisted myself up onto it again.

As I sat there with my shoulders slumped, my chin resting in one hand, listening to my guests titter as they dispersed, J4 edged up next to me, sucking on the straw of a slushie. "Fun party," she said brightly, and I groaned.


	46. Tak's Side of the Story

Well honestly, RKB, I think the issue is less that Tak is literally unable to control Gaz - Gaz may be the strongest-willed motherfucker in the universe, but it's not as if she's got superpowers; as a leader with practically unlimited power, Tak could still have her arrested and executed with a snap of her fingers - and more that she's emotionally hamstrung here. Tak _could_ do just about anything she wants with Gaz, but she won't, because she cares for her so much (more than she'd admit to anyone, herself included).

I think the lack of control she's feeling is a lack of control over her own feelings, which is frustrating for someone who's been brought up to recognize an emotional range consisting of "desire for snacks" and "drive to succeed." As we see in this chapter, her feelings for Gaz – not even Gaz herself, really – are one of very few things that can throw her off her game.

Oh, and no, neither of them ever has said "I love you" out loud; that wasn't an oversight. I don't think it'll be a part of this story arc, though. It may happen eventually – _very _eventually – but not yet.

**45. Tak's Side of the Story**

_Tak speaking_

That child! That horrible, treacherous, impertinent _beast_ of a child! I should have had her killed. I should have sentenced her to death for the way she spoke to me, in front of _everyone_, no less!

I should have punished her, but all I did was watch her walk away; I think that was what infuriated me the most. I was actually angriest with myself, after Gaz left the Armada, for having been stupid enough to let her.

Not that I wasn't angry with her. We'd argued before, but I'd never_ hated_ her so much as I did now. I thought of her and felt nauseous, wanted to kick someone in the gut; several unfortunate attendants ended up tossed out of airlocks when they approached me at the wrong moment. No matter what I tried to do, I was distracted by the infinite loop of the things she'd said to me playing in my head, shattering my focus like a rock thrown through a window.

Every time I began a sentence, I inevitably cut myself off raging about her insolence, her _audacity_, while whoever I'd been talking to blinked helplessly up at me. For the first time in more than twenty years, I was completely useless to the Empire, because all I could think about was that loathsome human child.

At first, I had assumed she would be back the next morning, having realized how foolish she'd been. But the day passed without word from her, and so did the day after that; I cancelled all of my appointments and spent those days stalking back and forth on the bridge platform, fuming at the crew. I had people from all over the universe – councillors and ministers, fleet commanders, the Tharlian emperor – on the line constantly, trying to figure out why I wasn't returning their calls, but I was too preoccupied to pick up.

By the fourth or fifth day with no sign of Gaz – save for the blip of her ship's signal on the positioning map, reminding me all the time how far away from me she was determined to get – I was no better off than I'd been on the first, and debatably worse. Few were fool enough to speak to me. Rel no longer bothered asking if she should clear my schedule for the day. Even Mimi kept her distance, after I snapped at her when she tried to talk some sense into me.

I didn't know how the Empire was faring without its leader, and I didn't care. All I had the will to do was sit slumped in my lounger on the bridge, sucking listlessly on the straw of a soda, every so often vaporizing one of the planets on my viewscreen with the push of a button.

_If my world has to fall apart, _I grumbled silently to whoever might have been living there,_ so shall they all. _

I hadn't even retained the perspective to feel sorry for Vix, who probably felt like the center of the whole thing even though she wasn't, really. When a quarrel was coming, it was coming, and it never especially mattered what about; if it hadn't been her, it would've been someone or something else. Still, it _had_ been her, and we'd ruined her birthday party and embarrassed her in front of all of her guests. I should have felt worse about that than I did.

She came to me on the bridge on the sixth day. Staring with glazed eyes at the viewscreen, I heard nervous _click-click_ of her footsteps approaching my lounger. "Mum?" she said softly, after a moment. "Are you—um—okay?"

"Of course I'm not _okay_." It had been awhile since I'd had someone to rant at. "How could I possibly be _okay_, when I've been demeaned and humiliated by the one person I was fool enough to believe I could trust? When I've been accused of being an illegitimate ruler and an incapable parent—called blind, thoughtless, _lazy_—in the presence of my entire court? I assure you, Vix, I am far from _okay_, and you have that ungrateful rat you call _Mom_ to thank for it."

Vix sighed. "I'm sure Mom didn't mean what she said."

"Are you?" I sat up in my lounger and turned around to glare at her. Actually, to glare _up_ at her; she'd grown a fair bit since she was a larva, and unlike most of the crew, when she stood and I sat she was above my eye-level.

"Why are you on _her_ side, anyway?" I demanded. "Don't you remember what she said about you? She called you a _spoiled brat_!"

She didn't remind me that I, in my unthinking anger, had said some unkind things about her too. "I'm not on anybody's _side_," she said desperately. "I just want you guys to make up and be happy again."

"We'll 'make up' when _she _comes to _me_ and begs my forgiveness," I muttered, sinking back down in my lounger. "If I'm feeling generous."

By that point, I had lost all track of where we were or where we were going. So when I caught sight of a particular planet out of the corner of my eye, I couldn't say if it was inhabited, or what it was called—all I knew was that for some reason, it irritated me. I couldn't say why _that _planet, when there were so many others within a laser's reach. I just didn't like the look of it.

It was a sort of honey-brown color, crisscrossed by swirls of gold, and for a quarter of a second it made me think of the child's eyes. Her coins-of-amber eyes. Burning into mine as she spat _I can't stand this place. _Glaring at me over her shoulder before she left.

All of a sudden, I felt my fury renewed, and my hand shot out to smack the button set into the arm of my lounger. In a quarter of a quarter of a second, the honey-brown bug on my windshield was permanently wiped away – vaporized by a hot pink blast of the Massive's laser cannon, never to remind me of those traitorous eyes again. It made me feel better, if only a little bit.

"_Mum_!" Vix cried. "What was _that _for?"

"Be silent," I sniffed, the cathartic effect of destruction – like a single, unsatisfying squeeze of a stress ball – already beginning to wear off. "You're too young to understand."

An anxious murmuring among the bridge crew drew my gaze to the ring where they were stationed, zeroing in on an especially miserable-looking drone in a red coat. After much hissing and elbowing from his neighbors, he swallowed hard, and said hesitantly, "Ahh—my Tallest? With all due respect, uh—that was—"

"I don't care what it was!" I snapped (maybe more like snarled). "You'd think it was your mother's parlor, for the tantrum you're throwing! Where do you get the nerve to question me?"

He paled and dipped his head. "Apologies, my Tallest."

"I don't want your filthy apologies. Shall I call someone to throw you out the airlock, or would you rather step out yourself?"

"Mum!" Vix protested again, tugging on one of my sleeves like she used to when she was a year old. "He didn't _do_ anything!"

I swatted her away. "Fine, fine," I conceded grudgingly, eyeing the red-clad drone with contempt. "I won't have you killed; I'll just have you exiled from the Empire. Leave my presence and my ship this instant. If I ever see you again, you'll be dead before you can offer me any more of your worthless apologies."

Vix shook her head despairingly as the unlucky drone trudged off of the bridge, but I suppose she was wise enough not to say anything more. She just deposited herself on the edge of my platform, swinging her legs above the crew's heads, and I resumed brooding out loud.

"Ungrateful rat," I reiterated in a bitter mumble, half to myself, half to Vix. "After all I've done for her. After all I've_ given_ her, how hard I've tried to make her happy—you wouldn't even _exist _if it weren't for my being kind to her. She wouldn't even _be _here if it weren't for me.

"If it weren't for me, she wouldn't be commander of anything; she'd just be sitting like moss on a tree on her stinking homeworld, slowly decomposing over video games and pizza. If it weren't for me, her life wouldn't _mean _anything. I've given her everything she has, and this—and _this_ is how she repays me?"

I dug my fingers into the arms of my lounger, surging with fresh hatred and misery. "I should have stopped her," I growled. "I should have had her thrown in the hold—should have shot down her ship the minute she left the docking bay. I should send the Armada after her right now, and have her executed for treason."

"We both know you're not going to do that," Vix said quietly.

"Do we?" I narrowed my eyes at the back of her head. "You know, you're exactly like her. All you ever do is cut me down. You don't take me _seriously_, that's my problem right there—you treat me like a tamed animal, like a toothless lion. How is it that the entire rest of the Empire would lay down their lives for me, and yet neither of you affords me so much as an ounce of respect? Am I just a joke to you? Is that it?"

"Of course not, Mum. That's not what I meant."

"Oh, very likely. I'm surprised you didn't defect with your odious cow of a mother."

Again, Vix sighed, and got to her feet. "Well, I can see I'm not going to get anywhere with you," she said resignedly as she left the bridge. "See you around, I guess."

Thus, having successfully alienated every single person who might have been sympathetic to me, I descended steadily further into ruin. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't think or talk about anything but Gaz, and I simultaneously despised her and missed her so much it was physically painful. We'd been apart for longer, when she would go on missions with her fleet – but never without keeping in touch, and never on such bad terms. I'd never had to face the prospect that she might not come back.

In fact, those days reminded me of the days I'd spent with Nine, twenty years – had it really been twenty years? It seemed like so much time, in one breath, and in the next no time at all – ago. Like I had then, I lived in a blur, this time numbed by my own anger instead of her wavebreaker.

Like I had then, I felt trapped in my own body, a mass of writhing, seething tension with no outlet. Seeing the world as through a long, dark tunnel, forgetting everything that had given me purpose only a short time before. This time, though, there was no fightback voice calling out to me. This time I had done it to myself.

Halfway through the second week with Gaz gone, I found that my restless wanderings had taken me to Nine's control room. Her memorial. Her grave. I didn't know what had become of the rest of the networks' control centers – if they, too, were as slain gods rotting in their shrines – but no one had wanted the job of scraping what remained of Nine out of her shell.

And we didn't especially need the space occupied by the room, so it had gone untouched for twenty years. Nine's destiny was to decay in a dark room for as long as anyone could foresee, surrounded by a stillness and a silence so complete it nearly suffocated me.

I entered the room almost warily, as if she might, after all these years, wake and begin to scold me. Of course, she didn't. Her yellow eyes, that once glowed with a light I would have died to swim in forever, were nothing but grey marbles now.

Her voice no longer filled the room. Her cables hung motionless above my head. The _clack_ of my boots the loudest noise to resound through this room in ages, I stepped forward and ran my fingers over the glassy surface of one of her eyes, leaving twin trails in a thick coat of dust.

I would still have been her _little vine_, if it weren't for the child. I closed my eyes.

_You have been through a great deal with her. You feel she understands you, _I remembered Nine saying, heard her voice as clearly as if she still lived. And then, _she has broken more than your seal. Your every cell cries out for her, even now._

With my palm, I wiped the rest of the dust from the eye I had touched, and stared into my own reflection. I tried to recognize who I was underneath the twists and turns of circumstance—a kernel of unchangeable truth, some essential Tak-ness that had been with me since gestation and would remain with me until I died. I felt myself bound again, in layers of change and chance. Ribbons spun of everything that had blown me about throughout my life.

Ribbons of the Academy—of Devastis and Dirt—of my old ship crashed, repaired, rebuilt—of the industrial district and the Massive and the Presentation tower on Irk. Ribbons of naiala leaves and untrellised vines. Ribbons of Six, Nine, Mimi, Gaz, Vix, even ribbons of Dib and Zim; ribbons of _Sticky Tak, little one,_ _my Tallest, Mum. _I wondered what would be left of me, were all of those ribbons unwrapped.

"I can't do this alone," I said softly to Nine, or maybe just to myself.

_But neither can I do it without my dignity, _I didn't say aloud, _my pride, my principles, a _backbone. _And if it's one or the other, what am I to do?_


	47. Gaz's Side of the Story

**46. Gaz's Side of the Story**

_Gaz speaking_

I sure hoped that bitch was pleased with herself, because life sucked more than it had since Nine was around.

There was no way I was going to hang around the Massive with Tak acting like a raging asshole, but I didn't actually have anywhere else to _go. S_o I ended up just bumming around the galaxy in my ship, pissed off and griping to the crew about what a dick she was. It wasn't like I wanted to go back to the Armada – I did, after all, have a point to prove – but it wasn't exactly a fun way to live.

It was useless to try to sleep, or even just relax, because every time I lay down and closed my eyes I saw her face in their lids, sneering at me as she said _you'll still belong to me_. Every second I spent in idleness, I spent getting angrier and angrier over the whole thing.

Everyone who talked to me got blasted with a diatribe about how much I hated her, how I was never going back, _ever_, not if my life depended on it, not while she was in charge, and if she thought I was an enemy of the Empire then so be it, I would start an empire of my own and declare a fucking war. It wasn't long before the crew learned to avoid me when they could, and not to speak to me unless it was absolutely necessary.

Which was fine. I didn't want to talk to them, anyway. It wasn't as if they were much comfort; all they could do while I ranted was lower their eyes and mumble _yes, Commander Gaz _every so often, because she was their Tallest and it would be treason for them to agree with me when I called her a condescending cuntbiscuit_. _They were already in deep enough shit, staffing the ship of an enemy of the Empire.

So I told them to go wherever the fuck they felt like, so long as it was far away from the Armada, and shut myself in my private quarters at the back of the ship. Thus secluded, I spent my time lolling on a couch in front of a big screen set into the wall, zonked out on Irken video games.

Every so often, I would scarf down a few slices of pizza, or knock back a slushie, but it was always as if I'd just had a shot of Novocaine; my mouth was numb, and the food tasteless. I think at that point, even a pizza from Bloaty's would have tasted like burnt rubber, which spoke volumes as to how bad fighting with Tak fucked me up.

What else was there to do? Had I been a machine, my default setting would've been 'play video games', and in the absence of anything more meaningful I returned to them.

I blew through about sixty games – three thousand levels – in a week, one hundred and sixty-eight hours of mashing my thumbs into buttons, leaving my hands sweaty and smelling like the controller. I jumped hurdles, wasted robots and dodged asteroids until my eyes burned and watered when I glanced away from the screen. It wasn't what I'd call _fulfilling_, but it was…

Fuck. What _was_ it?

I was lying there on the couch one day a full week after I'd ditched the Armada, head hanging upside-down off of one end, looking at the screen out of the corner of my eye. It was an easy game, this one, and I could play only half-looking at the screen with the controller clutched to my stomach, my right thumb swiveling an analog stick I couldn't see. Plus, the blood rushing to my head helped me not think about Tak.

No one from the crew announced her, and I didn't hear the doors _whish_ when she came in, so I startled when a pair of legs in striped tights strode into my field of vision. "Hi, Mom," Vix said, sounding simultaneously hopeful and dejected.

I nodded as best I could upside down. "Hey."

She had come to find me in her ship – yet another of Tak's ridiculous birthday presents – and I knew she was going to try to talk me into making up with Tak. I understood how she felt. I felt like a total dick for ruining her birthday party, and for forcing her to go through all of this crap with us; she'd never asked to be caught in the eye of our shitstorm. But I was too busy licking my own wounds to think about bandaging hers.

"You have to come back," she pleaded as I hoisted myself upright, coming to sit on the couch next to me. "Mum's turned into a tyrant without you. She's having people killed and exiled left and right. She completely ignores her schedule, she doesn't pick up when anyone calls—I'm afraid to find out what'll have happened by the time I get back."

"Ha! Serves her right. I knew she'd lose it without me." I shook my head. "Sorry, Vix – and sorry to all those poor bastards dealing with the Almighty Asshole – but I'm not coming back. Not until she asks me. Not until she _begs_ me—until she comes to find me herself and apologizes for being such a douchebag, and tells me exactly how _indispensable_ I am."

"But she won't," Vix said weakly. "You know she won't and so do I. And if you've each decided you won't make up until the other apologizes—then—what? Is this going to go on forever?"

I snorted. "Maybe just until she runs the Empire into the ground."

Giving up for the moment, Vix slumped her shoulders and surveyed the room, her expression slowly changing from one of despair to one of questioning distaste. I could see Tak in her face when she curled her lip, and I had to admit, it kind of made me want to smack her.

"So…what have you been up to?" she asked, forced neutrality in her voice, as she wrinkled her nose at a candy bar wrapper sticking out from between the couch cushions.

"Don't look at me like that. I may not be living the high life, but I'd rather go scuba-diving in a pool of broken glass than hang around the Massive hearing about what a _burden _I am to your selfish prick of a mum."

"Well, I guess it seems that way now, but—"

"But what?" I frowned. "What are you, on her side? As I recall, she was as much of a bitch to you as she was to me. She practically said straight-out she didn't love you." Conveniently enough, I'd chosen to forget that I, meaning to insult Tak, had insulted her too.

"Why are you both so convinced I'm on somebody's _side_?" she said, her face etched with frustration. "It's not like I'm rooting for one of you to _win._ I don't want either of you to lose."

I let out my breath and pushed a hand through my hair, realizing in the process how greasy it had gotten. I hadn't had a magic space shower – or so much as picked up a brush – in days. "Look, Vix," I said, making a concentrated effort not to snap when I spoke to her, "I know this must suck for you.

"I know you don't deserve it, and I'm sorry we dragged you into it. But you trying to play relationship therapist isn't helping anybody; you'd be better off grabbing some friends and going on vacation as far away from both of us as you can get. If I were you—if I _could_—I'd get the hell out of Dodge and forget this whole thing."

Vix didn't even have to think about it. "Well, I'm not you, Mom," she said softly, matter-of-factly. "And I'm not going to do that."

I guess I should have found that admirable. Instead, I just found it annoying.

Flopping back down onto the couch, I glanced at the screen and realized I'd left the game running while we talked, losing all of my lives and ending up at a black screen with the words 'new game?' blinking in big, bright Irken letters. Oh, well. I picked up my controller, pressed a few buttons, and began guiding my green blip of a player-character through a maze of thorns and cement blocks, every so often whipping out a huge hammer to beat random enemies to a bloody pulp.

Whenever I did, I imagined that the bat-winged squid demons and rats the size of office buildings and snakes with whirlpools of fangs were Tak, telling me I was meaningless, sniffing _well, what _does_ one do? _When the controller vibrated with the kickback from the killing blow, my lips hitched bitterly.

As I whaled mercilessly on clumps of pixels, I found myself venting to Vix, having had no one to dump my misery on in several days. "I just can't_ believe_ her, you know? All that shit she said to me. Now that she's got the Empire kissing her ass, she thinks she can treat me like dirt, but she owes me more than she's ever going to admit. Fuck, if it weren't for me, she would be dead.

"If it weren't for me, she wouldn't be the Almighty anything. I mean, sure, I didn't _mean_ to do it, but the fact is that I _did_ do it, and now she uses the power _I _gave her to try to banish me from the Empire. God knows I _did_ mean to save her from Nine. Risked my life for her, and what's it gotten me? Jack shit. I made her everything she is, I gave her everything she has, I chose her over my home and my people and everything I'd ever known—and this is how she repays me?"

Of course, it wasn't like Vix was going to get what I was talking about. I'd always been careful to censor my bedtime stories, and even now that she was older, we'd never explained everything to her.

Actually, we'd never explained everything to _anyone_, because Tak would have been mortified beyond the ability to function if anybody knew she was only the Tallest because I'd sweet-talked my way into her leggings in the anglerfish forest. I guess it was a measure of what I still felt for her, even then, that I didn't take the opportunity to humiliate her by telling Vix exactly what she owed me.

Even when Vix made it incredibly easy for me. "I don't even know half of what you're talking about," she said, shaking her head.

"Yeah, I know." I cracked a wolf-whale over the head a second before it lunged at me. "You wouldn't understand."

Vix sighed. "Mum said the same thing."

So Vix took off and I was alone again, pumping monsters full of lasers and stuffing myself with snacks. It was literally the most meaningless existence I thought it was possible to lead. But any distraction was better than none, because if I wasn't distracted I'd be obsessing over Tak, and how much I hated and missed her.

And I did miss her, much as I didn't want to. When I let myself think of her, in the five seconds' walk from the couch to the translucent pink tube that delivered my food, the waves of anger were interspersed with waves of longing, both so fierce as to weaken my knees.

_That stupid stuck-up bitch. _Her face. Her eyes, that particular shade of purple, framed by black-veins-between-stained-glass eyelashes. Her beauty mark like the punctuation to their sentence.

_All I was doing was telling her something we all knew she needed to hear. I try to look out for Vix, and what does she give me? A verbal slap in the face. _The way she spoke, with her accent that somehow bridged the gap between Irken and English, and her voice that could be deep and harsh and soft and silk-shot all at the same time.

_Belong to her. _Belong_ to her. Who the fuck does she think she is? _How she squirmed and twisted and gasped when I touched her somewhere she liked, said things I knew no one else would ever hear. Her body relaxing after her crisis, as the tension melted from her limbs.

Video games may not have been quite the cure-all they were when I was a teenager, but they were a hell of a lot easier to handle than that.


	48. Tension and Release

**47. Tension and Release**

Two weeks into my semi-self-imposed exile from the Armada, I lay practically catatonic on the couch, making a quickly-failing effort to care about the game whose colors filled the screen.

I had no idea what time of day it was – as if it mattered in space – where we were, or how many video games I'd plowed through in fourteen days, popping one after another like a bottomless bag of M&Ms. I didn't know what this one was called or what its premise was. I just laid there numbly jabbing my thumbs into buttons, watching my points climb and hearing tones _bling _without registering what they meant.

This time, when the doors opened, I heard them. I hit _pause_ on my controller, hoisted myself up far enough to peer over the back of the couch, and—what the fuck do you know? There stood Tak, her arms folded tightly over her chest, her lip curling like Vix's had as she glanced around the room. Instantly, my guard flew up.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded, scrambling up from the couch as gracefully as I possibly could. There was no way I was going to vegetate on a couch for two weeks in my gown, so I was wearing only a shift dress and leggings, and it was all I could do to straighten them as I came around to face her.

She sniffed disdainfully, watching me tug the wrinkles from my dress and shove a hand through my grimy hair, but even in the low light I could detect the sallow cast to her face. "The database has informed me that this ship is due for servicing," she said flatly, refusing to look me in the eyes. "As you've defected and stolen my property, I am forced to come and retrieve it from you."

"Right. Because it totally makes sense that the Almighty Tallest would take time out of her schedule to do something any crew monkey could do. Or haven't you been keeping to your schedule lately?"

She frowned, then pressed her lips together, as if to contain the color I could sense rising under her cheeks. "My schedule is none of your concern," she said, as haughtily as I suspected she could manage. "As you are an enemy of the Empire and a dangerous fugitive from the law, I decided it would be best if I came to deal with you personally."

I snorted out a short, hard laugh. "A dangerous fugitive. Should I take that as a compliment?"

"Take it however you please. I'm only here to collect this vessel, and then I'll be on my way."

"Right. And what do you expect me to do, once you've collected my vessel and been on your way? Float around in space?"

"What _you _do is of no interest to me," she snapped. "For all I care, you can float into a sun."

Contrary to what she said were her intentions, she didn't proceed to kick me off and 'collect my vessel', as I'd known she wouldn't. Instead, we stood in the half-dark not looking at each other, but not quite looking away, each of us stealing narrow-eyed glances when she thought the other wouldn't notice.

The tension in the room was palpable. A certain restless energy hovered in the air between us, as if we were two magnets pressed together at their like ends; it pulled us together and kept us apart, waiting for someone to speak, someone to act. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to grab her and kiss her or haul off and slap her across the face.

"So take the ship, then," I said finally, spreading my arms out palms-up at my sides. "No one's stopping you."

Her jaw tightened. "Fine."

"Fine."

Again, we stood in silence, avoiding each other's eyes. I could almost feel her trying to make herself turn around, willing herself to leave and not look back and be, at all costs, the strong one. The winner. "I'm not going to apologize," she barked after a minute, glaring at me.

"Neither am I."

"I wasn't the one in the wrong."

"Well, if I agreed with you, we wouldn't have a problem, would we?"

Frustration weighted the corners of her mouth. "It's treason just to say that, you know," she informed me. "I could have you killed for mouthing off to me."

I smiled smugly – not because I really had much to smile about, but because I knew it would piss her off. "You've tried to kill me before."

"I think it's safe to say things are different now."

I took a step closer to her, in a gesture universally recognized as meaning _bring it the fuck on._ "Tak, you could be as tall as a skyscraper," I said coolly, "and command a fleet ten times the size of the Armada, and you'd still be no more able to kill me than when you were a half-dead shrimp squatting in the industrial district."

She accepted the challenge. "Would you care to test that theory?"

Of course, my ship wasn't near as big as the Massive, but it was big enough to have a projection arena. It was a high-ceilinged, dome-shaped room adjacent to my quarters, onto whose sloping walls holographic environments were projected. Like those in J4's old vivarium, they made the already-large space seem even larger, with a three-dimensional quality that impressed endlessly-unfolding worlds on the sterile grids of the walls.

The setting we chose was a cityscape, winding streets and towering buildings rolling out to meet the red line of the horizon. Into real space climbed a maze of dark blocks and columns that mirrored the city's structures, made of the same spongy material that carpeted the vivarium.

All this we saw when we stepped out of our respective prep chambers, dressed in skintight jumpsuits (mine black, hers purple) and pulling on visored helmets, mine over a sloppy bun of freshly combed and cleaned hair. I had to say I felt better, having gotten out of that room and had a magic space shower. More than ready to take her on.

I swung up into the cockpit of my minicruiser – a shining, streamlined black capsule of a ship, big enough for a pilot and its control panel and nothing else – and eyed Tak through two layers of windshield, blood rushing with the promise of physical release. Maybe not the kind we were used to, but release all the same.

We rose up above the simulated cityscape and faced each other in midair, the clock on the wall of the arena counting down the seconds until the game begun. When its display read all zeroes, we charged.

The minicruisers weren't meant for use outside the arena, so they had only three instruments on their control panels: a rear viewscreen, a joystick to work the throttle, and a button to fire lasers. I slammed the joystick down as hard as I could, and she swerved sharply a second before we collided head-on; I felt the side of her capsule scrape along mine. The next thing I knew, she had dived and disappeared into the labyrinth of columns, the violet shimmer of her capsule inviting me to follow.

I weaved through a forest of foam-block buildings in pursuit of her, continually frustrated by a skill for (or at least experience with) piloting that far outstripped my own. When I eventually caught up with her, I laid into her with my lasers until she whirled, glowering, and chased me up into the open space above the columns.

There, she couldn't zip away around a corner and elude me; there, my proficiency with brute force would serve me well. I laid on the throttle and rammed into her again and again, knocking her around the dome like a pinball, nearly cracking her capsule's unbreakable windshield

But it _was_ an unbreakable windshield (as was mine; as the arena was designed for sport, so the minicruisers were designed to be unable to seriously damage each other), and it wasn't long before she'd learned to anticipate my strikes and repel me with laser-blasts like a moth swooping at a porchlight. I fled and for a time we were back among the columns, darting and dodging. I found myself thinking it was a good thing the cityscape bounced and gave – if those buildings were real buildings, we'd both have been lucky to get away with concussions.

Putting together a plan, I rocketed up through a gap between columns with Tak close behind, leading her all the way up to the open space before I jerked back my joystick and suddenly stopped. Sure enough, she smacked into me, and through my rear viewscreen I saw her spiral down to land on top of a tall, thick column. She could've shot back up after a second – I knew I couldn't have put her capsule out of commission – but she didn't.

Instead, she did something much more interesting. As I watched, hovering in my capsule, she retracted her windshield and stepped out onto the building's flat roof. In one hand, she brandished a staff, near as tall as she was – no blades, no lasers, just a slender silver staff. I lowered my minicruiser to the surface of the column across from hers and, feeling for a similar weapon stashed in my capsule's wall, vaulted out of the cockpit.

A reptilian smile flickered across her lips. "Afraid, child?"

With a swing, the short length of steel in my hand whipped out to become a staff like hers, glistening in the fluorescent arena lights. "You wish."

With our pak jets as propulsion, we leapt from column to column in hand-to-hand combat, the _clang _of steel against steel ringing out throughout the dome. I wasn't sure whether she never _tried_ to actually hit me with the staff, or if I always blocked her before she could; I wasn't sure if I was trying to hit her, either. Either way, we swung and struck and swiped and never once caught flesh, never bruised.

It was almost thrilling, how evenly we were matched. She lashed out and I parried, I lunged and she dodged. I sprung from one column to another and turned a second before she pounced on me, my staff crossing hers in midair. When they were locked in a silver X, scraping, quivering, my forehead beaded with sweat and my hands slick in their gloves, I looked through my visor and into hers, found her eyes slit and sharp as chips off a chunk of amethyst.

I recognized the smell of her sweat, the heat of her breath steaming up her visor, the way her muscles tensed under her jumpsuit. I wondered if, had anyone been watching us, they'd have been able to tell how well we knew each other – if there wasn't something intensely intimate in the way we danced this dance.

There was for me, at any rate. By the time she'd backed me into a triangle of rooftop, I wanted her so bad it was throwing off my concentration. One swipe of her staff actually grazed my helmet, and that was when I decided it was time to bring this thing to an end.

As she pulled back to strike again, I ducked and slipped around behind her. With her still caught up in the momentum of her swing, I swept my staff lightning-fast along the column's surface, and toppled her ankles like bowling pins. Before she knew it, her feet had slid out from under her and she was sprawled out on the spongy roof, her staff, with a flick of my boot, kicked out of arm's reach.

I stood over her, staring down at her. When she tried to sit up, I raised the end of my staff to the center of her collarbone and shoved her back down. Planting the staff in the foam an inch from her head, I slid my fist down it and folded my knees slowly, until our faces were a foot apart. I yanked off and discarded my helmet in one fluid motion, then reached down to remove hers. She glared up at me, her chest swelling and shrinking in hard, quick pants.

I let the staff clatter to the roof, clasped her face in hot, steel-smelling hands, and kissed her. Hard.

And she kissed me back, like I'd known she would. With shaking arms she encircled my shoulders, as my knees buckled and I crashed into her, and with a shudder of her chest she sighed into my mouth. The Novocaine finally wore off and I remembered what it was like to taste something, smoke and metal and cardamom. I wondered how I'd breathed without breathing her.

We didn't mean it to happen – well, I didn't mean it, I don't know if she did – but soon our legs were entwined and we were grinding against each other, still kissing. It had been too fucking long. Our make-up sex was usually better than this, but then again, we usually weren't so desperate.

I realized I didn't want to wait to peel the jumpsuits off and apparently, neither did she, because she was pushing back as frantically as I was crushing myself against her. It didn't matter, anyway. Those jumpsuits were paper-thin. You could feel everything through them, and I only needed about half that to get where I wanted to be.

We must have looked pretty fucking ridiculous, lying there glommed onto each other dry-humping like crazy, but I didn't care. I needed this and I needed it with her, and I knew when she arched her back, gasping wetly against my cheek, that she did too. I felt it when she reached crisis (funny how I never thought twice about it now, calling it what she called it) and it pushed me over the edge, groaning through grit teeth, my face buried in the crook of her neck.

When it was over, we lay limp and sticky in a heap, struggling for breath. I heard her make a hoarse, self-conscious noise. "Well, that was pathetic," she mumbled.

"Don't worry," I purred sleepily, seeing absolutely no reason to move an inch from where we were lying. "I'll do you right tonight."

"We haven't established if I'm going to let you."

"Are you serious?" The world seemed to shift around me as she pushed me off of her and sat up, her silhouette blocking out a Tak-shaped sliver of the bright light. I frowned as I lifted my head, peeling a fringe of sweat-slick bangs off my forehead. "If that wasn't making up, I don't know what is."

My body cried out in protest, but I pushed myself up beside her, blinking uncertainly at the back of her head and the purple curve of her shoulder. For a little while, she said nothing. Just sat there steadying her breath, and staring at the foam between her knees.

"You left the Armada," she said at last, without looking at me, an accusing finality in her voice. "You can't just—_leave_ the Armada."

"Why not?" I said stiffly. "Because I need your permission? Because I _belong to you_?"

"Because if you leave the Armada," she snapped, "how am I supposed to protect you?"

That shut me up a minute. I let out my breath and edged a few inches closer to her, softening my voice when I said, "I've been away from the Armada before."

"Yes, with your fleet. When you were _prepared _to take on a threat. You left two weeks ago with a skeleton crew and no idea where you were going – and judging by the state I found you in, in no condition to defend yourself against anything. What if something had happened to you? What could I have done?"

My fingers slid over her shoulder and squeezed gently. "I can take care of myself, Sticky."

"I don't want you to have to."

Sort of absently, she picked up her helmet and held it in her lap, gazing down at our reflections in its visor – her face, stretched out, eclipsing its convex surface, and mine a white blip hovering beside her. She tilted and turned it slowly, watching the images ripple and shift.

"I could be as tall as a skyscraper," she said quietly, cradling the helmet as if it were a crystal ball, "and command a fleet ten times the size of the Armada, and it would all be meaningless if I couldn't protect you."

There was nothing I could say or do to answer that, except lean in to press my lips to the shiny hill of her shoulder beneath her jumpsuit. I rested my head there for a minute, inhaling the familiar smell of her cooling sweat. "What I said," I began at length. "About you and Vix."

I felt her stiffen and raised my head, my right hand drifting up behind her to play with the spiral of her left antenna. "I didn't mean it…as harshly as I said it. But I do worry about her."

The tight set of her shoulders slackened as I stroked her antennae, trying to think of how to say what I had to say without sending us both flying into a spat all over again. "I know you want to take care of Vix. I know that now that you're finally in the position to, you want to make sure she has all the luxuries you didn't have, and avoids all of your disappointments.

"And I _know_ it sounds corny, but—those disappointments made you who you are. Your failures, your stupid mistakes, your bad luck—all of those times you fell and got back up again. How is Vix going to learn to get back up if she never has to fall?

"You didn't revolutionize the Irken power structure by having solar systems handed to you on silver platters. You didn't get to where you are because your life was _easy_, and that's all I want for her—not to have a life that's easy, but to have a life that _means_ something. To have to fight for what she has, so she'll know not to throw it away. To have the chance to become an infuriating, challenging, fascinating person – like you."

She nodded, faintly, and sighed. "The last thing I want," she said, "is for my daughter to become like Red and Purple."

"I know."

For a little bit longer, we sat there in not-uncomfortable silence, as I ran my fingers wanderingly along her left antenna. When we decided – without words, without glances, in unison – that it was time to move on, she looked at me. "So are you coming back or what?"

I raised an eyebrow. "Am I still an enemy of the Empire?"

"I suppose not." She got to her feet and extended a hand to help me up, beckoning impatiently. "Come on, hurry up. I've got a lot of calls to return."


	49. Vix's New Job

**48. Vix's New Job**

_Vix speaking_

So my parents made up, finally, and what did I get out of it? A job.

They came back to the Massive a couple of days after Mum had taken off by herself to find Mom (on some flimsy pretense involving ship-servicing), having fought it out and made up and probably had some really disgusting sex, and announced that they had decided that I should have a job. To learn responsibility, they said. To develop a work ethic.

What's more, they'd decided what it would be. Mum had been running into problems with the director she'd installed on Earth back when it was assimilated, and now they figured that, being myself vaguely Earthly in origin, I would be a good choice to replace him. I wasn't wild about the idea, but what could I do?

My fate had been determined, and if it would keep my parents from leaping to each other's throats again, I would accept it as best I could. Besides, as Mom pointed out, it wasn't as if I would be flipping burgers or mopping floors. Most teenagers' first jobs didn't involve near as much power, freedom, or respect as mine would, she said – actually, _no_ power, freedom, or respect – so I ought to be grateful.

Thus, I found myself staring at the viewscreen as the captain of my ship's crew took us down to Earth, plunging through the swirling shell of smog that greyed the atmosphere. Further down, we were received into a port in the clear orb that encased the planet, studded with vents through which the factories' smoke belched and bled; inside it, an artificial atmosphere sustained our human workforce.

Gazing down at the planet's surface, I saw not the blue oceans and green-brown land masses Mom said were once printed on globes, but a landscape that was overwhelmingly red. No water, no trees, no mountains. Just factories, and an infinite expanse of muddy, bloody red.

The sky, too, looked red from the surface, though I didn't have much time to look at it. As soon as we landed, outside the administrative complex in the center of our settlement, I was hustled into the receiving hall. There, a pack of attendants, in between undressing and redressing me in vestments deemed appropriate for my new position of authority, explained to me exactly what my new job would entail.

After the purge of the unfit, there were about four and a half billion people left on Earth, organized by capacity for labor into a series of barracks striping the planet's surface. Each unit housed a thousand people, collectively called a "pod", managed by four and a half million Irken officers. Those officers reported to a more elite group of forty-five hundred supervisors, and those supervisors reported to me. My official title was Director of Labor and Production, and I was pretty much the ultimate authority on Earth, which was cool.

My job would mostly involve meeting with the supervisors – not on a regular basis, since there were way too many of them; just as obstacles arose – reviewing production reports, and planning new initiatives. You know – word comes down that we need more screws and less rivets, I do the math to move a couple of pods off rivet-cutting duty and onto screws. Simple.

Still, I would have to meet and address the supervisors and officers (the latter via live videofeed, since there wasn't a stadium big enough to fit them all on Earth), if only so they would know who I was. Simple. Right? Except I had never given a speech before, and I'd never imagined I'd have to so soon.

Mum gave speeches all the time, but it wasn't like I'd thought to take notes. Barely aware of what was going on, I found myself suddenly shoved out onto a dais facing an expectant crowd, stumbling inelegantly up to the waiting podium. I swallowed hard and blinked out at the thousands of Irken faces looking back at me, some attentive, some cynical, some thoroughly bored.

"Um…" I scratched my head, trying to think what there was to say. "I'm the new director, I guess. You've probably heard of me? Well…I don't really have much to say, so just keep doing what you were doing before, okay? Seems like it's worked so far."

It was no Address for the Assimilation of Earth, but it satisfied me. I'd hopped down off the podium and marched off with my attendants before I realized I hadn't even told them my name.

But hey, whatever. They probably knew it already, right? Right. I decided that what I ought to do next was get a look at at least a few of the humans who made up the "Labor" part of the "Labor and Production" in my new title, just so I knew what I was working with here.

Thus I arrived, escorted by a train of attendants, at a square in an officers' compound near the arena, where that sector's officers lived when they weren't on duty. The sector's pods were marched through every morning and evening on their way to and from the factories, or so my attendants told me; that morning's procession would be by soon.

One of Mum's statues decorated the center of the square. There were heaps of them on all of the conquered worlds, some cast in gold or silver, some carved from marble or stone. This one was a pretty burnished silver, reflecting the red light.

It stood taller than all of the buildings in the compound, like Mum always stood taller than everybody around her. She looked as sinuously unsmiling as she always did in the flesh – cold and beautiful, like the polar ice caps Mom had taken me to see before Earth was conquered. Her eyes were smooth, shining purple stones, framed by obsidian lashes. A chip of obsidian denoted the beauty mark under her left eye, a diamond the frontal anchor point on her wavebreaker. No inscription was necessary.

I found it strangely comforting, that statue, and it was on the tiers of its base that I settled to wait for the procession. I was sitting there with my attendants, thinking about how I might like to have a statue of my own somewhere (deciding what I'd want it to be wearing, and how I would do my hair), when my ears cocked to the drumbeat of marching in the distance, growing steadily closer to the square.

"These are pods one thousand through three thousand," an attendant murmured into my ear as the first wave of humans began to troop through the square. "Mostly young, classed for light labor – graphics application, buffing and waxing, you know. Kids' stuff."

I nodded and watched the procession...well, proceed. My eyes moved from row to row of animated grey jumpsuits. The bodies that filled them were smallish, by human standards, and most of them were girls. A few scrawny boys and older women dotted their ranks, but a good three-quarters were young women and girls, too weak in constitution for the hard labor the older, stronger humans would be doing.

They came in all colors, shapes and sizes (for some, a 'weak constitution' meant being delicate and wispy; for others, shufflingly fat), but none were younger than fifteen. When Earth was assimilated a little over five years ago, everyone under the age of ten had been eliminated by the bioselectors, and since then no more humans had been born. Mum was as yet undecided as to whether or not it would be worth the investment to breed them.

Each thousand-person pod (fifty rows of twenty) was headed up by a supercilious-looking Irken officer wielding a shockrod, flanked by a pair of hulking guard robots. I was no expert, but it looked like they'd done a good enough job here; none of the humans balked, bolted or so much as fell out of step, and the shockrods and guard robots seemed more a formality than a necessity. If there had ever been a threat of rebellion, as we often faced on conquered worlds, it was long-quashed and forgotten. Which made my job all the easier.

I was just about to tell my attendants to show me to my quarters, having had my fill of watching the humans march, when a flash of yellow near the end of the procession caught my eye. No, not yellow—blonde. At the end of one row marched a girl with the sleeves of her jumpsuit rolled up over her elbows, and the most beautiful blonde hair I'd ever seen.

It hung long and sleek like the veils I'd seen women wearing in the hot, dry parts of pre-assimilation Earth. It shifted from gold to near-white as she moved through columns of red light, like a panel of silk shot with fine shining threads. I decided that I had to find out who that was wearing it.

"Stop the procession," I said quietly to the attendant next to me.

He looked surprised, but he didn't question me. "Stop the procession!" he shouted, loud enough for everyone in the square to hear him.

The pods that had already passed moved on, the sound of their massed footfalls softening with distance, but the blonde girl's pod – pod 2708, according to its officer's badge – and all those behind it halted sharply at his word.

Everyone – the humans, the officers, the guard robots – was silent and stock-still, their eyes following me from the base of Mum's statue to the blonde girl at the end of the row. Thousands of eyes and a couple of attendants, who jumped down off the statue's steps to scurry after me.

I approached the girl to find that curtain of hair just as miraculous up close, and her eyes, fixed on the back of the girl in front of her, a stunning shade of deep blue. Blue eyes and blonde hair weren't something I saw often (or at all, really) on the Massive, and I took a moment to appreciate them, independent of the body they belonged to.

I did notice, though, that the girl was pretty – willowy, with a heart-shaped face and fine features, and exquisitely pale. I could see her breath quivering in the air as I examined her, no doubt thinking I had picked her out to have her slung over a chopping block and beheaded, or something else equally ridiculous and barbaric. Unlike J4, the humans wore their numbers on their right forearms. A black laser-stamp stared up at me below the hitched-up cuff of the girl's sleeve: 2708-512.

"You," I said to her, flicking my eyes from her forearm up to her face. Her startling eyes, her snow-colored cheeks, her lips – even in this time when makeup was a black-market trade, this time of colorless rations and sterilized water-substitute, this time of baths and showers replaced by a weekly spin through the disinfection chamber – full and pink and soft. "What's your name?"

I saw her throat twitch as she swallowed. "Tren."

"Tren," I repeated, enjoying the sound of the word. I looked at her a few seconds longer, then said, "I like your hair."

She said nothing. Her commanding officer, who had crept over to lurk uncertainly at the edges of our exchange, spoke up. "The Director has given you a compliment, 512," she said, somewhat insincerely. All of Mum's subjects had to respect me, but there were a good faction of them who didn't at all _like_ me. I could almost hear what she was thinking: _filthy abomination. _"You should thank her."

"Thank you," Tren said grudgingly, avoiding my eyes. The officer cleared her throat, and Tren added, "Ma'am."

Nodding, I took a step back from the procession and waved a hand at the officer. "Go ahead. That was all."

The officer marched back to her position at the front of her pod and barked something I didn't pay attention to, setting the rows in motion again. They trooped on through the square, Tren's blonde hair swaying gently behind her, and I stood watching her until it faded to a yellow glimmer amid the factories' smog.

"2708-512," I said to one of my attendants as we turned to leave the square, eyeing him until he took the hint and whipped out a tablet. "Make a note of it. Have her brought to my quarters this evening, after distribution of rations."

Again, he looked confused, but nodded his compliance. "Yes, Director Vix."

So I headed to the director's residence with my train of attendants scrambling after me, no longer thinking about my statue, or even about how cool it was to have been called _Director Vix. _Thinking only of the coming night, and the fascinating human girl called Tren.


	50. Walking in Darkness

**49. Walking in Darkness**

The director's residence was a complex apart from those of the officers and supervisors – a palatial estate, naturally incomparable to the Massive, but not unimpressive as these things went.

The days here were more strictly regimented than they were on the Massive, where my parents pretty much just decided when it felt like night and day. The smog in the skies kept them an unchanging muddy red, but the humans needed their sleep and the Irkens wanted their breaks, so on-shifts and off-shifts had to happen on a schedule. When evening drew the curtains on my first day on Earth, I dismissed my attendants, videoconferenced briefly with my parents, had a snack, and went to my bedroom to wait.

My attendants had asked if I wouldn't rather receive Tren somewhere more formal – the director's residence had its own receiving hall, where I could've enthroned myself and sat like Mum looking down at everyone, and a whole host of conference rooms – but I said no. I just wanted to hang out with her, and my bedroom seemed fine for that.

I'd customized it to look a lot like my room at home on the Massive, with pink walls and lavender bedclothes, plus a big screen across from the bed so I could conduct business in my pajamas if I felt like it. Not that the idea of my "conducting business" anywhere had entirely jelled with me yet. I still couldn't quite believe I was really _in charge_ of anything.

In any case, I was sitting on my bed, painting my fingernails pink with a special polish Mom commissioned for me, when I heard a knock on my doors. "Come in!" I cried, not bothering to get up from the bed.

The doors slid open on Tren, glaring at the floor, and the surly officer from the square, shoving her ungently over the threshold. "Good evening, Director Vix," she said stiffly. "I've brought 512, as requested."

"Thanks." I waved towards the open doors. "You can go now. I'll send her back with an attendant when we're done."

With a sharp nod in my direction, the officer grabbed Tren by a fold of her grey jumpsuit, and jerked her head down so as to speak into her ear. "Whatever she wants, do it or else," I heard her hiss, just a note too loud to escape my earshot. "If you piss her off, it'll be my head."

Tren didn't say anything, just straightened up slowly as the officer showed herself out. When the doors _click_ed shut, she glanced up at me, scowling. "What do you want with me?" she demanded, surprisingly rudely seeing as we'd barely even met. "I haven't done anything wrong."

"Oh, I know." Suddenly, it dawned on me why she was standing so awkwardly, in that one spot by the doors with her hands behind her back. Blowing my fingernails dry, I leapt off the bed, took her by the shoulder (feeling her all but turn to stone under my hand), turned her around and flipped the switch to deactivate the laser-cuffs binding her wrists, standard issue for situations like this.

"I didn't ask you here because I'm mad at you," I said cheerfully, bouncing back onto my bed. "Wanna sit down?"

She just stood there with her arms hanging limply by her sides, staring warily at me. "What is this, a joke?"

"Uh, no. I just wanted to talk to you. Is that a problem?"

For another moment more, she just looked at me, lip half-curled with something between revulsion and disbelief. Then, she laughed without smiling – one of those short, hard, huffing laughs I sometimes heard jerking from Mum's throat, when nothing was really funny. "Fuck. You're just a kid."

"I'm fifteen. Ish."

"Fifteen." She said it like she'd have liked to spit. "Younger than me, even, and they put you in charge of a planet. _These_ are the people who enslaved the human race?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, well. 'S what happens when your mum runs everything."

"How sweet. Your _mum_." Polluting her pretty face with an ugly sneer, Tren folded her arms tightly across her chest, as if to remove as much as she could of herself from the space we shared. I tried not to let it dishearten me. "If all you want is to _talk_ to someone, why me? What have I done to deserve the _honor_ of your interest?"

Somehow, I got the feeling she didn't really see it as an honor. "I don't know, I just like you," I said, rallying as much optimism as I could. "I've liked you ever since I saw you. You're prettier than the other humans. I'd like to…"

My voice trailed off and I found myself needing to swallow to wet my throat, blood suddenly rushing to my cheeks. "I'd like to get to know you, is all."

I didn't know what my…_intentions _were, so to speak. I mean, Irkens didn't _date._ The only model I had for a romantic relationship was my parents', and I hadn't seen how it started. There were Mom's stories, but they changed a little every time she told them, and at any rate I got the impression that her idea of "flirting" with Mum had been grabbing her by the collar, kissing her as hard as she could, and announcing exactly how things were going to be from that point on.

Even if I _was_ the ultimate authority as far as she was concerned, there was no way I was doing that to Tren. And I didn't even know if I _wanted_ to. I didn't know how it felt to have a crush on somebody, what to call the fluttering in my stomach when I looked into her eyes. I wasn't sure I knew the difference between the way I felt about my friends, like J4 and Mimi, and the way I felt about Tren.

But she, at least, seemed to know right away. "You're kidding, right?" Tren said, the venom in her voice weakened by the horror on her face. "You think—with _you_? Never."

This time, she actually did spit, right onto my rug. _If I _were_ Mum, _I thought bitterly, watching the glistening glob sink into the carpet, _enthroned in a receiving hall, looking down at everyone, I'd have her beaten near to death for that. _"What do you think I am?" she snarled.

Finally, my friendliness curdled into a frown. "I think you're a bitch, that's what you are," I snapped, feeling and probably sounding unjustly wounded. "What did I ever do to you?"

She blinked at me. "Are you serious?"

"Um—yeah?"

Looking at me like I'd slapped her in the face – shaking her head slowly, so that her long blonde hair caught the light swinging from side to side – she backed up until she was almost pressed against the door. She began to speak under her breath, muttering to herself, so that I could barely hear her at first.

"You took…_everything_ from me," she whispered. "You and your _people._ My home, my family, my future—everything I'd ever dreamed—gone. I was eleven years old when it happened. My little sister would've been thirteen now." Her eyes glazed and she dug a fist into them, choking. "I haven't seen my mom or my dad in more than five years.

"Every day, we work until we can't hold our heads up," she said savagely, "and we have nightmares when—_if _we sleep. I pray every night I'll die before I wake up." As if of its own accord, one of her hands crept up to her chest, palming the sliver of white skin that peered out through an undone button on her jumpsuit. I found myself thinking about how lovely her hands were, long and smooth and slender, and wondering how it would feel to press my fingers into the soft flesh above her heart.

"I tried to get out, in the beginning," she went on mumbling, clutching at her chest. "Didn't see any point. I wouldn't eat and they force-fed me, watched me to make sure I didn't throw up. I pried a sharp edge off some scrap metal, hid and slit my wrists—you know they can heal anything with lasers? Didn't even leave a scar.

"Not even when I jumped out of my bed, eighth up, and only broke my leg. I was walking the next day, and sleeping on the first level that night." Again, she trembled with that barking laugh. "They said _you are the property of the Irken Empire, so if you kill yourself, you steal from us. And we do not tolerate thieves._"

I wasn't sure what the big deal was. "Yeah, that happens a lot with the slave races," I said, nodding. "Eventually, they learn."

I wished she would stop acting so weird and babbling about the past and come over and sit with me, so that I could hear her talk in that sweet silvery voice about something that wouldn't turn it cold and rasping. For all the fuss she was making, she'd never even answered my question. All she did was glower at me from across the room, her porcelain-doll face gone pink and swollen like she was about to cry.

"You're a monster," she said, in a hiss made thick with waiting tears. "Just like the rest of them. I'd sooner _get to know_ a black hole than know you."

She whipped around, apparently having forgotten that she couldn't just storm out without my permission. Still, she dug her fingers into the seam between the doors and tried to force them open, her effort valiant, albeit futile. "Let me go," she said tightly, without turning around.

I could've said _no._ I could have made her stay and talk to me. I could've had her rations cut, or had her transferred to a pod where they hauled boulder-sized blocks of steel instead of polishing cruiser components. I could've had her lashed until she lost consciousness, for daring to disrespect me.

"Fine," I sighed, reaching out to touch the panel by my bed that would open the doors. "Go."

When the doors opened, she strode out without a glance over her shoulder, no doubt to be intercepted by an attendant who'd steer her back to her barracks. Alone again, I let out a groan of frustration, and flopped flat on my bed.

I sat up most of the night puzzling over our exchange, trying to figure out what went wrong. I just didn't get why Tren was so _angry. _Sure, we'd enslaved her people, but that was just what we _did_. It wasn't _bad_, it was natural, and we could no more cease to conquer than a lion could cease to hunt.

Like Mum said, the strong devour the weak. Did moons get angry at suns for being bigger and brighter than they were, for commanding solar systems while they followed planets? How could they? And how could Tren be mad at me, for being a part of the people that happened to have eclipsed hers?

Well, to my mind, she was just being a poor sport, but I knew I wasn't going to convince her of that. And poor sport or not, I still longed to be near her. As I laid awake in bed, I found myself thinking not of the mean things she'd said to me, but of her big blue eyes, fringed by long pale lashes, almost iridescent – like peacock's feathers – in the soft light of my bedroom.

I thought about her hair swaying when she shook her head, and the delicate white stems of her wrists, and the curves of her body underneath her grey jumpsuit, so different from anything I'd known until now. I realized I still desperately wanted her to like me, and not because I'd ordered her to.

So the next day, instead of sending for her, I had an attendant escort me to the factory where pod 2708 worked. Tren sat in the middle of a row of other girls, her hair shining like a sheet of molten gold, and used a paint gun and a stencil to stamp various surfaces – cruiser wings, soda cups, weapons cartridges and more, all delivered on one of many conveyor belts striping the factory floor – with Mum's insignia. Now I _knew _she was just a drama queen. How bad could graphics application possibly be?

I popped up over her shoulder and announced myself. "Hi!"

Tren startled and her paint gun swerved outside the stencil, sending a black line of spray paint cutting across the console plate she'd been hunched over. "Shit!" she said under her breath, glaring at me over her shoulder. "You made me—"

"What is this?!" Tren's officer barked as she stomped down the row, the other girls gulping and ducking over the belt. "What's the hold-up? 512, didn't I tell you—" She stopped short when she noticed me, her voice shrinking back into her throat, her bluster burning low. "Director Vix," she said, straining to sound pleased by my presence. "I didn't realize you were here."

"Uh-huh. I just wanted to chat with Tren."

The officer frowned. "May I—ah—show you to somewhere more private?"

"That'd be great, thanks."

So she directed us to a spare room off the factory floor, where we stood facing each other – Tren with her arms crossed, her strawberry ice cream-colored lips downturned, and me doing my best to look penitent. "I told you yesterday I want nothing to do with you," she snapped as soon as the doors had shut. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

"I just have something I thought I should say to you." I cleared my throat and folded my hands behind my back, rocking once on my heels. "I'm sorry," I said nobly, and waited for her scowl to ease.

Dismayingly – really, _unbelievably_ – she wasn't impressed. "You're _sorry_?" She raised her eyebrows. "What are you sorry _for_?"

"I don't know," I said, flustered. "I'm just—sorry."

For a moment, she was silent, regarding me with eyes as beautiful and impenetrable as blue marbles. When her brow finally did smooth, it didn't make me feel as good as I'd hoped. "You know," she said, releasing a long breath, "everyone here hates you. You and your mother, that human woman posing as Irken royalty—they hate you even more than the Irkens.

"_They're_ just alien monsters, they think; they don't know anything else. But _you._ You and her are traitors, worse than any tyrant. You know what it is to be human, or at least partly, but you turned your backs on us. Human blood runs through your veins, and yet you smile as it's spilled."

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. "But I don't hate you, _Director_ Vix. Not anymore. Actually, I pity you. I feel _sorry_ for you, because you're living in a castle built on the bones of your own people. You're calling the shots, but you have no idea what you're doing; you think you're better than us, but we're not so different, are we? You're just a sad, stupid little girl wearing a crown that's too big for you, pretending to be something you're not, and you may be free but you're fucking blind."

Without so much as asking my leave to go, she turned and the doors slid open, framing her in a widening beam of fluorescent light. "You'll live your whole life walking in darkness, lying to yourself. Never knowing what you really are."


	51. Complicated

**50. Complicated**

"So show me."

Before Tren could leave, I spoke up and stopped her, suddenly knowing what I could do to make her want to stay. It had dawned on me, finally, while she was giving her little speech about how she pitied me.

It was clear enough that she wasn't going to relate to me as an Irken (no matter how many times I apologized for things that weren't my fault), but I was playing with a double-sided deck. I thought maybe if I approached her as a human – or at least someone who wanted to be – she'd see me in a different light.

She glanced over her shoulder and the doors slid shut again, tired of waiting for her to step through them. "What?" she asked, not kindly, but at least she was still there.

"If you know so much about me, then show me _what I really am. _Teach me; I want to learn." Whether that was true or not, I wasn't sure—but when I saw her eyebrows draw upwards, the hard line of her mouth soften almost imperceptibly, I felt more than justified. "Blame my mom if you want, but I was raised Irken. I _don't _'know what it is to be human.' If that means I'm blind, open my eyes. You don't have anything better to do."

She snorted. "Maybe not, but that doesn't mean I need to waste what time I have playing Pocahontas to your John Smith. Give me one good reason why I should make your problem mine."

"I could make it worth your while." I widened my eyes with as much meaning as I could muster, lifting and turning out my palms. "If you're so miserable in the barracks, come and live in my complex. You wouldn't have to work anymore. I could feed you, take care of you—find your parents for you, if that's what you want. It would be easy."

I could practically feel her bending, under the weight of that last offer especially, but she refused to break. "No," she said after a minute, with a furious, whipping shake of her head. "No. I don't care what you offer me – if getting it means sucking up to the Irken bureaucracy, it won't be _worth my while_."

"_I'm_ not 'the Irken bureaucracy', Tren. Look at me. Remember what you said yesterday? I'm just a kid."

"Yeah, the _kid _of that smug bitch who called herself _the bringer of our end. _She's the only reason people call you a princess instead of a mongrel. Even the Irken scum around here only respect you because of her. How can you expect anyone to see you as separate?"

"Okay, first of all," I retorted, frowning, "I'm nobody's _princess. _I'm not a part of some royal line or whatever, and I'm not going to inherit Mum's title. If she died right this second, I'd be left with nothing, and as much at the mercy of her successor as you or anyone else in the universe. Second—and understand this right now, because I won't say it again—_I'm not my mum_!

"Yes, I'm her kid and I can't change that, but I'm not going to take responsibility for the things _she_ does, especially not the things I was too little to even have had any part in. I mean, I was like six years old when the Earth was assimilated—what do you suppose she did, _consult_ me?"

"Well, I—" She paused midsentence, furrowing her brow. "Wait. You were six years old five years ago? And you're—_fifteen _now?"

"No, I was four years old five years ago, so I guess I'm nine now. In human years. But I'm fifteen—um—" I flicked my hand through the air like J4 sometimes did when she couldn't think of the word for something. "Mentally."

Considering that, I glanced down at myself – at my body under my director's vestments, grown to look more like Mom's or Tren's than Mum's or even J4's. Mom told me I was lucky to have the glandular organs she called _tits_, but in my experience, they were just kind of…squishy, and useless. "And, uh, physically. It's complicated."

For a minute, she just stared at me, as if I were some monstrous animal in a terrarium at a zoo. Then she shook her head again. "Whatever," she said, with a coldness it seemed she had to strain to achieve. "Argue with me all you want; you know I can't stop you. But you're not going to change my mind."

That time she did leave, before I could think what to say to stop her. She padded out in her soft-soled uniform shoes, the sound of her footfalls as impotent as Mum's boot-clacks were intimidating, and I watched her hips switch and her hair flounce as she went.

I knew I didn't break Tren that day, but I felt sure she had cracked. I had seen the look on her face when I said _I want to learn_, and I knew I had tempted her. She _wanted_ to be the one to turn me against my people, to show me what she thought I really was.

Maybe that 'sucking up to the Irken bureaucracy' stuff was just bluster, and she was hoping if she got in with me, she'd get in with Mum, and score a better situation for herself and whoever else. Maybe she thought we'd turn the whole lot of her people loose, like billions of horses from a paddock. I didn't care. As long as she was interested – as long as she had a reason to want me around – I'd be happier than a nafglee in its nest.

So I came back, and kept coming back. Every day, if I had the time, which I nearly always did. Throughout the succeeding weeks and months, I made myself a constant presence among the ranks of pod 2708, appearing alongside Tren as she marched, when she sat hunched over her stencil, at the mess while she picked at her rations with a spork. Of course, I got lots of weird looks from 2708-511 and 2708-513, next to Tren wherever she went, but they weren't the ones I was after.

I also incurred the wrath of her officer, the tallish (by Irken standards, meaning she came up to about my—err, tits), green-eyed malcontent I learned was called Effa; I could just _feel_ her itching to smack me every time that fake smile crawled across her face. But what could she do? Officers like her were a monie a million – she was only a little bit higher-ranked than the humans she was commanding.

Plus, if she was as tall as she was and still stuck working as an officer, I knew she had to be a troublemaker. She had absolutely zero power to do anything about anything, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy watching her stew.

I talked to Tren about lots of things – her work (_soulless and exhausting, but at least it saves your mum some money on machinery)_, her food (_can you really call this _food_?),_ even her life before the assimilation (_I'm done crying over spilt milk, and I'm sure you don't really care_).

I asked her to tell me 'what it was to be human', to be met at some times with a bitterly lyrical eulogy for the virtues of humanity, at others with a grunt and a muttered _like you'd even understand. _I tried to think of things to tell her about myself that would convince her I wasn't as horrible as she thought I was, even though it usually backfired.

Several times, I brought her gifts. A ring set with precious stones from the mines on Ndra, a cloak spun from blue Shrithian silk that matched her eyes, a bushel of the yellow laceflowers that grew in the mountains on Ponono. Always, she sneered and shoved them back in my face.

_What am I supposed to do with those? _she'd say. _You can't buy me, _she'd say. _Is that the kind of girl you think I am? _she would ask. _The kind of girl who hops into bed with the first asshole who gives her jewelry? I may be a slave to your race, but I'm not a whore in your harem. _511 and 513 would nod approvingly on either side of her, glaring at me.

I became more infatuated with her every day—longed all the more to make her mine.

Mom and I videoconferenced fairly often – Mum and I less so, since she was always busy – and I told her about Tren. She liked to brag about the human girls she'd had eating out of her hands before Mum came along, so I figured if anyone would know what to do in my situation, she would. Thus, two or three months after I'd first come to Earth, I sat curled up in a scoop chair in the videoconference room, lamenting the sad state of my love life to Mom's blown-up face on the screen.

"I mean, I guess it's not _so_ bad," I sighed. "At least she tolerates me now. Sometimes, she'll even talk to me like I'm an actual person, instead of just another cog in Mum's machine." It was true: by that point, if I caught Tren in the right mood and brought up the right topic, I could almost pretend we were friends. But I wanted more than that.

Mom shrugged. "That's something."

"But it's not _enough, _Mom. I don't just want her to tolerate me, I want her to like me—you know, _like_ me like me."

"Well, first off, you should know that however she feels about you now, it has no bearing on how she'll feel about you later. When I—err—_re-_met your mum, she was trying to kill me. Remember: when a girl says 'I hate you', she just means 'I'm not crazy about you _yet_.'"

She flopped back in her dish chair and kicked her feet up on the console, grinning. "Second, you have to make the first move. You can't just waltz around schmoozing her and giving her presents she doesn't want; she'll walk all over you that way. If you want something, you have to_ take_ it."

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I _mean_, walk up to this bitch and tell her how it's going to be. Kiss her, and if she slaps you, kiss her again. Women love a jerk, Vix, and you're in a perfect position to be one." She cocked an eyebrow. "Come on. Who knows what she's talking about?"

"You do, I guess."

"You mean you _know_." Her eyes flicked briefly sideways, then downwards, and finally back to mine. "Oh, and when this works – because it _will_ work – do us both a favor and don't tell your mum, okay? I think it'd be better for everyone involved if she didn't know you were having a thing with a human girl."

I wasn't sure why she would think that, but it wasn't a big deal. "Uh, sure. If you say so."

The next day, I showed up at the factory in the morning. Swallowing a lump of what had to be the most nervousness I'd ever felt, I brushed past Effa, approached Tren's stool, and tapped her on the shoulder. "Well, what a surprise," she said dryly, knowing it was me before she even turned around. "You're early toda…"

Her voice died in her throat when she turned, and I took her face in my hands, and leaned in so close I could smell her skin and her sun-colored hair and pressed my mouth to her mouth and kissed her.

For about a second, it was perfect. Her lips were as soft as they looked, and I was breathing her breath, touching her face, feeling her eyelashes and a stray strand of hair flutter against my cheeks, and I could feel my pulse exploding in a frenzy of fear and joy and the sudden, crystalline certainty that this was the only thing I'd ever wanted, the happiest I'd ever be in my life.

Then – when time, for an eternity hovering, had at last remembered gravity – Tren jerked away, and (just like Mom had said she would) smacked me full across the face. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she snapped as she shoved me away, a rush of blood under her skin making apples of her cheeks. "Get the fuck off of me!"

511 and 513 (not to mention a host of other faces turned from their work by the commotion, peering at Tren and I across the rows) tittered and smirked at me, and I felt the blood rise to my cheeks, too. Internally scrambling for something to do or say – knowing I couldn't, just _couldn't_, bring myself to do what Mom told me and kiss her again – I grabbed Tren's wrist and took off, dragging her with me to the spare room where we'd met when I first came to the factory.

"You obnoxious little shit," she hissed at me before I could say anything, cowing me into a corner of the room. "How dare you? I mean, seriously, how _dare_ you? In front of _everyone_!" She stepped back, fuming, breathing hard, squeezing and releasing her fists. When she'd collected herself, she scowled and gave me another brief, perfunctory shove in the chest, as if trying to muster the will to start a fight. "I'm not even a lesbian!"

I frowned. "What's a lesbian?"

"A—I—" Her anger wilted momentarily, crowded out by bewilderment. "A girl who likes other girls. You didn't know that?"

"I didn't know there was a special name for it," I said, mystified. "I thought that was just how things were."

"Well, it's not. Or at least, not always. Anyway—" She shook her head, as she often did when she was trying to force herself to be mad at me. "It doesn't matter. You could be a boy, a girl, or a rock, and I would still hate you."

"You don't hate me." Taking a deep breath, squaring my shoulders, I emerged from the corner she'd backed me into and spoke with all the confidence I could summon. "I know you don't. I saw you try not to smile when I gave you that moonfish in the hoverglass. When we talk, I hear you try to stop yourself from sounding like you enjoy it.

"I see you glance at 511 and 513 every time I come around, and I can tell when you're meaner to me because they're watching—because you don't want them to think you're _sucking up to the Irken bureaucracy_, even though you like me a little bit more every day. Maybe you wish you could hate me, but you don't—and you know it."

It was a gamble, but when I saw the flush return to her cheeks, I knew it had paid off. She glowered at me as she fumbled to recover, and I felt a triumphant lightness fill my chest. "Even if I don't hate you," she muttered, glaring at the ground, "that doesn't mean I want your disgusting alien slobber all over my face."

Again, I felt my face warm. "What? Didn't I do it right?"

She smirked. "Well, you obviously hadn't done it before."

"Like you have!"

"Who says I haven't?"

"You spend all of your time with nine hundred and ninety-nine teenage girls! If you're _not a lesbian_, who have you been kissing?"

"Well, when I said I wasn't a lesbian—what I meant was—" She paused and thought, biting down on the pink crescent of her lower lip. "Like you said before," she amended. "It's complicated."

Tucking a lock of hair behind her ear – and could there have been anything prettier than her ear, like a white half-moon, illuminated where the flesh was thin? – she cleared her throat and regrouped, snarking, "Anyway, I'm sorry if it wounds your precious Irken pride, but that wasn't exactly the best kiss I've ever had."

I raised my eyebrows, seeing an opportunity. "So teach me how to do it better."

"In your dreams!"

"Fine," I sniffed. "I knew you were bluffing."

"I was _not_ bluffing!"

"Then prove it!"

"_Fine!_"

Fed up, she closed the space between us, grabbed me by the chin, and kissed me. At first, her mouth was tight, like she was holding something sour on her tongue, but I must not have tasted too bad because she loosened up quick. Her hand moved, hesitantly at first, from my chin to my neck, then slid down to become a warm weight on my shoulder.

She tugged gently at my lower lip, and slipped her tongue just a little ways into my mouth—not far, not for long, but enough to send all the blood in my body pouring down into my leggings, weakening my knees. Enough that I could taste her, like I didn't get the chance to before. She tasted of coconuts, of spring in the Maldives - flowery and sweet.

When we parted, breathing slow and hard, she blinked into my eyes for a moment, and the whole world was blue. Then she stumbled back, bright red, and fled—well, sort of fled, sort of stormed out, as if halfway between furious and terrified. For my part, I just lingered there, floating.


	52. Whispers in the Night

**51. Whispers in the Night**

_Look, Vix, _Tren had said in the beginning, _if you want this to happen, we've got to start doing things differently. You can't just show up at the factory and start making out with me. Think what you want about it, but I'm _not _going to be like your mom; if being with you means being known as 'the girl who sold out to become an Irken concubine', then you can just forget this whole thing. _

_So come to my complex, _I had said. _At night, in secret, or even during the day—you can tell them you're on some kind of special assignment. _

_No, _she'd insisted. _You want me, you come to me. Come to my barracks at night, when it's dark and everyone's asleep. If we're quiet and you don't stay too long, no one but Effa—no one who matters—will know you've been there. _

So I came to her. Every night, no matter what else I had to do. I made time for her—time to head to her barracks when the grounds were quiet and the factories empty, stealing beneath the brightly-lit windows of the officers' compound, past Mum's statue in the square.

I passed my palm over the reader and lifted my chin at Effa, sitting sullenly on guard duty at one end of the barracks, unable to do anything but press her lips together and nod back. She sat in a small circle of light emanating from a disc on the wall, but beyond it the barracks were pitch black. Ten rows, ten bunk-columns each, and every bunk-column ten beds high. A thousand humans, all asleep except for one.

Well, not _all._ The barracks reminded me of a huge tin can on its side, and every noise made in it echoed; I heard sniffles and muffled sobs bouncing off of the walls as I padded down the rows, having doffed my boots at the door. Even some who were asleep cried out in their nightmares.

The sounds of the barracks were my friends, during those nights, as they camouflaged the creak of Tren's bed when I climbed in beside her, disappearing under the thin scratchy blanket and wriggling up to her side. I'd spoon up to her back, and wrap my arms around her, and slide my head into the crook of her neck—breathing her scent, feeling her hair tickle my nose—and eventually, she would roll over and concede to kiss me. Then, we would do one of two things.

Sometimes, we'd just talk. Quietly, in tones a shade softer than whispers, so that our voices wouldn't penetrate the barrier of the blanket pulled over our heads. I'd switch on one of my pak-mounted lights, dimmed down to almost nothing, so that we could just see each other in the darkness – the glimmer of an eye, the curve of a cheek.

"What _is _that thing, exactly?" she asked once of the tiny light, her face bathed in its blue glow. "The thing on your back, I mean. All of the Irkens I've seen wear them, but I never—I mean, is it just a glorified pocketknife or what?"

"It's a pak," I said, a bit at a loss to explain something I had always taken for granted. "It—uh—does things. Everything. It's how I can speak English to you even though I never learned it, how I can go without sleeping or eating for weeks at a time. Plus I think I might die without it, maybe. I'm not really sure. Everybody else would – everybody who's all the way Irken, anyway – but my mum never explained if I was the same."

"Seriously?" She snorted. "Wow. Sounds like the mighty Irken race isn't so mighty after all."

"I guess," I said shruggingly, willing to agree with anything so long as I was lying next to her.

Another night, she reached over and cradled my face in her hand, smoothing her thumb along my cheek. I felt her flinch, like she always did, when my scales retracted at her touch. "You're so weird-looking," she said musingly, and I wrinkled my nose.

"Uh, thanks?"

"Well, you are." She slid her thumb wanderingly over my jaw, and I realized I didn't care what she said, provided she said it while she touched me this way. "You're so human, but at the same time so…_not_." She paused to play a moment with a lock of my hair, hanging loose over my shoulders since I'd stopped wearing it in pigtails. She'd asked me not to, so as to distance me from _the Irken scum, _and I had agreed. "How does something like you even _work_?"

"Ask my mum. I'm not the one who made me."

Tren sort of sniffed at the notion, all the while exploring my face with her hand. "It must be weird, too, being you," she murmured, almost to herself. "Looking out from behind those eyes. Does everything look purple to you?"

I stifled laughter. "Uh, no. Does everything look like black-and-blue bullseyes to you?"

"Okay, so that was a dumb question," she admitted, rolling her eyes. "Still. I think I'd shit myself, if I looked in the mirror and saw your eyes."

"You really know how to give a girl a compliment, Tren."

"Oh, shut up." She leaned in and kissed me, bringing warmth to the cold mattress, the blanket that didn't keep out the chill of the barracks' steel walls. The taste of coconuts made me dizzy, smiley, half-drunk on happiness. When we pulled apart, I laid my head just an inch from hers on the pillow.

"You know," I said, intertwining our fingers (never more glad that I had four and not three, so that Tren's and mine laced up perfectly, and I felt every inch of the flower-petal skin stretched over her hands – the fine lines on her knuckles, the creases in her palms, the whorls of her fingerprints), "I've gotten lots of sideways looks throughout my life, but they were never about my eyes. People on the Massive used to think I was weird for having hair and ears and a nose, so…this is refreshing, I guess."

"That's another thing," she said grimly. "I can't even imagine being you—with _them_." She regarded me bitterly, with the same anger that always darkened her eyes whenever she talked about Irken anything. This time, at least, she wasn't angry at _me_. "How could you stand living like that? They must have been awful to you."

"Not really. They'd have liked to be, probably, but my mum wouldn't let them, and they all love her. I think they have to. Like, physically—they're kind of hardwired to. 'Cause she's so tall."

"Look, I'm sorry, Vix, but one of these nights you're going to have to figure out that every new thing you tell me about your mum just makes me hate her more." A scowl dug a deep groove between her eyes. "I don't understand. How could someone so horrible have raised someone as—well, as relatively okay as you?"

To me, Tren was a goddess, but _relatively okay_ was the nicest way she'd ever described me. I ached with delight to hear it. "Mum isn't all horrible, you know," I mumbled into Tren's pillow. "They don't always do the nicest things, but she and Mom love each other, and they love me."

"People like them don't_ love_ anything or anyone. They only use and hurt people, and if they haven't yet, they'll hurt you too."

She pressed her lips to the place where my jaw met my neck, lingering there for a long while before speaking again. "You won't know what real love is," she whispered into my ear, "until you know what it is to be truly human."

_I believe you, _I wanted to say. _I believe you. I'll believe anything you say, if we can stay like this forever. _Instead, I was still and silent, blinking into her iridescent eyes. She carded her hand through my hair, and her nails combing my scalp sent shivers down my spine.

"You're such a funny color, too," she switched topics after a minute, cracking a grin. "Like a green bean. I bet you look just like one naked, huh?"

We'd never actually seen each other totally naked, even though one usually would be for—well, the thing we did when we _weren't_ talking. It was hard enough as it was, with both of us wrapped up in the blanket, trying desperately not to make too much noise (not to mention that she was at least somewhat inexperienced, and I was completely new to the whole thing). We'd decided early on that undressing was too complex a maneuver for the space we were working with, and settled for what would be safe.

Which was still…oh, _good _seemed too small a word. True, it was awkward, the first time and lots of times after that; I didn't know where or how to touch her, and she started off not sure she even _wanted_ to touch me. At first, I was just kind of pawing at her like an animal, shoving my hands and mouth here and there and everywhere, and she was wincing and taking me by the shoulders and pushing me away and hissing _Vix, please. This is too weird. _

She had to show me how to start from a kiss—how to move my hands from her face down to her neck, her shoulders, her breasts (_who the fuck told you you should be calling them tits?_) and undo the buttons of her jumpsuit, gently, without hurrying. How to caress instead of grabbing, explore instead of devouring. It was the most fun I'd ever had learning anything.

And when I _did_ learn, things were better. I'm not talking about when Tren, having come around to the idea, slid her hand under the waistband of my leggings, and I felt some things I'd never felt before. That was nice, but it wasn't what I kept coming back for.

I came back for the part when I cupped her breasts in my hands and smoothed my thumbs over her nipples, when she sighed into the pillow while I kissed her neck, stroking the white triangle of skin exposed when her jumpsuit was unbuttoned halfway. When I journeyed lower and my fingers found the hot wet place between her legs, where a little part of me could inhabit a little part of her. When I made my fingers dance like she'd taught me, and she dug her teeth into her lip, and whimpered and pushed against my hand—that was the part _good _could never describe.

One night, a few blissful months after I'd first begun visiting the barracks, I had just begun to unbutton her jumpsuit when a small scrap of paper fluttered out onto the bed. "What's this?" I asked as I picked it up, curious.

"It's nothing. Don't—"

Before she could grab it and shove it back into her jumpsuit, I'd unfolded it, holding it close to the light. It was a battered square of paper no longer than my thumb, many times folded and unfolded, its colors greyed with age.

No—not just a piece of paper, a photograph, of a little human girl standing against a grey background. She had on a white sleeveless dress with a short poofy skirt, and matching white slippers. Her feet were planted heel-to-heel and spread apart, her arms positioned in front of her as if she were rocking a baby. She wore her blonde hair in a bun, and a big smile on her face.

"Who's this?" I asked, flipping it around to show her.

"My little sister." Tren snatched the photo and tucked it back into her jumpsuit, shooting me a glare. We lay there for a bit without speaking, without touching – her fingering the folded photo through her jumpsuit, staring at the mattress, and me praying I hadn't put her off being with me for the night.

"I had it on me when it happened," she said softly. "Can't even remember why, now. I managed to hide it while they were processing us, and I've kept it with me ever since."

"Oh." I tried to think of how to discuss the subject delicately, so that she wouldn't flip out like she had that day in my bedroom. "Why was she standing so funny?"

"It's a ballet position. We used to dance, both of us; that photo is from Picture Day at the studio we went to." That made sense, I thought. I'd always figured Tren for a dancer, with the fluid grace of every move she made; I looked at her and thought of milk poured from a long-necked jug.

"She was six, I think, when that picture was taken," she went on, after a deep, shuddering breath. "Her birthday was in November. Whenever it comes around—when I think it must have come around—I wonder what she would look like if she were alive."

I didn't know what to say. All I could do was lie there and blink at her, lost for words, as she scrubbed at one eye with her fist. "But it's better this way," she said, with renewed fierceness. "She's better off dead. I wouldn't want her to—to have to live like this—"

She sort of choked and fell silent, trembling, her eyes glistening. I wasn't sure what else to do, so after a minute I reached out to her and began where we had left off – undoing the buttons of her jumpsuit, gently, without hurrying. She sniffed and scooted closer to me.

When it was over – when she'd offered up her last spasm against me, hugged and reslicked my fingers, gasped into the crook of my neck – and we lay tangled up together, I thought I felt the cool patter of her tears on my neck. But I didn't say anything, or pull back to look. I just crushed a kiss into her hair as I stroked it, inhaling the smell of meadowgrass.

The next thing I knew, light was shining through the blanket, and my ears were filled with the sounds of feet. Feet shuffling amid blankets and swinging from the edges of beds, feet _clang_ing on ladder rungs, feet _thunk_ing on a cement floor.

As I stirred, blinked about – registering the mattress, the translucent tent of the blanket, Tren shifting, just-waking in my arms – I heard other sounds: the rustle of bedclothes, strains of hushed conversation. The _clack_ing of short, quick strides in boots, followed by Effa's strident cry.

"Move along! Move along! What's going on here?!" As her voice grew closer, the pieces fell into place, and my eyes snapped open wide. _Tren, _I tried to hiss in our remaining seconds, _Tren, wake up, we fell asleep, _but she was too groggy to understand. I heard Effa pushing past the rest of Tren's bunk-column, all assembled on the barracks floor, and realized it didn't matter anyway.

"512! How many times do I have to tell you—"

When the yanked the blanket off of us, letting the light rush in, Tren woke in one sharp blow. As she blinked up at the circle of eyes around us – the other humans, some shaking horrified heads, others snorting with contempt, and Effa boiling with barely-contained rage – the color drained from her face, and she gaped like a beached fish. She scrambled to sit up, push me away and pull her jumpsuit closed at the same time, but it was no use.

"512," Effa growled from between grit teeth, her eyes slit to near-nonexistence, "get up _immediately_, and join. The. Line."

Personally, I didn't have much reason to be embarrassed, or even flustered. I wasn't the one who'd wanted to keep us a secret in the first place, and besides, what could any of these people do? If anything, I was slightly indignant, at having been woken so abruptly by this uppity little officer who amounted to a clump of dirt in the ridges of my boot.

"She'll get up when I say she gets up," I said haughtily as I sat up, grabbing the panicking Tren by her arm. "Why don't you take the pod and move on, and leave us alone?"

Effa looked as if she'd have liked to murder me. "With all due respect, Director Vix—"

"If you respected me, you'd listen to what I said the first time. Or should I call my mum, and you can listen to her instead?"

Effa stood a moment glowering at me, all but shaking with bottled fury. Finally, she swallowed hard, whipped around, and waved her shockrod at the other humans, electricity crackling at the end of the black baton. "All right, move out!" she shouted. "Come on, come on! Last one in the barracks earns herself a lashing!"

The rest of the pod marched out in short order, with Effa snapping like a sheepdog at their heels. Satisfied, I flashed Tren a smile, and said, "There, now. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

Doing up the last of her jumpsuit's buttons with quivering hands, Tren jerked loose from my grip and got to her feet. She gulped down a thick breath, swiped her forearm over her face, and ran after the rest of her pod, without so much as a word for me—without so much as a glance at me, sitting bewildered among her bedclothes.


	53. Rhapsody of a Beautiful Life

Merry jingly, everyone! :D

**52. Rhapsody of a Beautiful Life**

I gave Tren a day to cool off before I went to see her again. I figured she'd just been upset over our being outed, and once she'd had a chance to calm down, everything would be fine. So I waited until the next afternoon, then went to visit her in the factory, to make sure the air was clear before I swung by that night.

But even as I approached her, I could tell something was wrong. Tren sat hunched over her stencil like a rabbit hunched behind a clump of weeds, waiting for the fox to sniff her out. Her entire body was tense, tight, and I could see her hand shaking on the paint gun's valve.

The stools on which they sat were fixed to the ground, but 511 and 513 sat on the left and right edges of their respective seats, as conspicuously far from Tren as they could get. As I came closer, I saw 511 let her hand slip on her paint gun, sending a jet of spray paint arcing over whatever Tren was supposed to be stenciling. Tren didn't move, except to bunch her muscles further, and I saw 511 and 513 exchange a smirk over her head.

As if that weren't enough, just then another girl in a grey jumpsuit walked by, loaded down with a stack of porthole panes for waxing, and casually shifted their weight to one arm as she passed Tren. With the other, she grabbed a handful of Tren's hair and yanked savagely, jerking her off her stool. Tren hit the floor with a stifled _unh _and the _slap _of her cheek against cement, and the girl with the porthole panes spat at the back of her head.

"Sell-out slut," she hissed as she stalked away.

"Tren!" I cried out and ran to her, horrified at the sight of her crumpled on the ground. Grabbing her hand, pulling her to her feet, I blinked into her eyes and found them bloodshot, wet. "What's wrong? What's going on?"

"Not here," she said hoarsely, keeping her eyes down and her voice low. "Let's just—can we go somewhere else?"

"Yeah, yeah. Of course."

As soon as the doors to the spare room clicked shut, Tren broke down in a jumble of sobs and shouts, her hands flying from my shoulders to her temples, her face flushed with what could've been anger or fear. "You see? Do you see what it's like for me now? This is why I wanted to keep us a secret! They hate me, they _hate_ me—they're calling me a traitor, they're calling me a whore, saying I forgot everything you took from us and I think I'm better than them.

"What you said to Effa only made it worse. Nobody speaks to me except to insult me. Nobody looks at me except to glare. They're stealing the blanket off my bed and the food off my tray, shoving me out of the marching line, harassing me whenever they get a chance—I'm sure Meer and Val are trying to stop me making my quota, so Effa will beat me. I can't live like this, Vix. I just _can't_!"

I wasn't sure if she was going to fall into my arms sobbing or fling herself at me and claw my eyes out, so I took a step back as I tried to calm her. "It'll be fine, Tren. I've been asking you to come and stay with me all this time. If you can't live in the barracks anymore, you can come live with me."

"One prison to another," she muttered, shaking her head. "I'd go stir-crazy in that place. Besides, it would be a Band-Aid at best; I couldn't stay there forever."

I chewed on that a minute, considering what other options I had. Then – all of a sudden – I remembered a conversation I'd had with Mom a few days ago, and all of the pieces fell perfectly into place. "I know what to do!" I burst out, triumphant. "I know what to do.

"My parents are bringing the Armada to Earth in just a couple of days, to visit me and see how I've been handling the planet; when they come, I'll get permission for us to take my ship and leave here forever. We could go _anywhere_, Tren. Anywhere in the whole universe, and you'd never have to work – or deal with these horrible people – another day in your life."

To me, it sounded positively paradisaical, but Tren remained restless. She swallowed, wiping away the crescents of tears that gleamed under her eyes, smoothing hair made messy by what I figured had been a sleepless night. I longed to save her – to take her away from all of this: the blood-colored skies and metal-smelling barracks; the people who didn't appreciate her, who didn't understand us – so badly it was all I could do not to grab her right then, and take off before her doubts could drag us down.

"Are you sure you'll be allowed to leave?" she said. "What about your job?"

"I'll quit. Mum can find a new director. Don't worry, Tren, it'll be fine; my parents give me everything I want."

Tren sniffled and rubbed the moisture from her nose with a rumpled sleeve, looking less than comforted. "I guess it's my only choice," she mumbled, looking at the ground. "I mean, the last thing I want is to make what they're saying true—but—I don't know what else to do. They'll never forget it, seeing me with you, and they're never going to forgive me. If I were them—I wouldn't forgive me."

"It'll be fine," I said again, pulling her into my arms and squeezing her tight. "It'll be great. You'll see."

I took her back to my complex after that, and brought her to my room. There, I flipped on the TV and flopped onto my bed, rhapsodizing about the beautiful life we'd lead on worlds beyond the stars; for her part, Tren paced and bit her nails.

She seemed to have forgotten what to do when she wasn't working – when every second of her time wasn't carefully structured, and she didn't have to plow through everything with her mind on the next task on the list. Without Effa glaring at her back brandishing a shockrod, or the rest of her pod marching beside her, jostling her along. It had been different when I was playing by those rules, working myself into her schedule, but now I realized it was probably better she hadn't come here sooner. She'd have been like an animal in a cage.

But soon, all of that would change. I kept telling her that: _soon, everything will change. It'll all get better. Trust me. _I hugged her and kissed her, said the most soothing things I could think of, summoned a fleet of service drones straining under huge platters of human food. I ran her a warm bath of sterilized water-substitute, encrusted with flasks of sweet-smelling soaps, and dressed her in a gauzy blue gown that swept the floor when she walked.

She didn't say much (only muttered under her breath, about harems and concubines and all that other stuff she was always moaning about), nor was she in the mood to be touched – but I didn't care. I was finally getting to take care of her like I'd wanted to take care of her since we'd met, and I was so happy I could've sprouted wings.

The Armada wouldn't reach Earth for another three days, but Mom's fleet was nearby, and I was expecting her before the next day was out. I was sitting at a console in my bedroom – ostensibly reviewing a growing backlog of supervisors' reports, in truth unable to focus for more than ten seconds without glancing over my shoulder at Tren brooding on my bed – when the intercom buzzed.

"Director Vix, Commander Gaz has just arrived at the administrative complex. Would you like to receive her here, or shall I have her escorted to your quarters?"

"Um—I'll come get her. Thanks!" I bounced out of my seat and across the room, where my boots waited by the doors. "Want to come with me?" I asked Tren as I tugged them on. "You could meet my mom."

"Believe me, Vix," she said flatly, "if you're trying to get them to do us a favor, you don't want me meeting either of your parents. Ever."

"Okay. I'll be back soon."

I hopped on the capsule rail outside the director's residence, and arrived at the administrative complex in seconds. In the same receiving hall where I'd met my attendants months ago, Mom stood unaccompanied, surveying her surroundings with her hands on her hips.

"Hey!" I announced myself brightly, surprised by how good it actually felt to see her in person. Ever since my first day on Earth, I'd been too wrapped up in Tren to feel homesick or miss anybody; I hadn't expected the rush of happiness that came with Mom's familiar presence.

"How was the trip?" I asked after a perfunctory hug, more a brief meeting of bodies than a real embrace (Mom had never been a touchy-feely person). "Did you get here okay?"

"Sure, sure. Just fine." She took a step back and looked me up and down, whistling a falling note. "Wow. You're all grown up."

"What are you talking about? I've been here less than five months. Besides, we've been videoconferencing all this time; it's not as if you haven't seen me."

"Hey, if I say you've changed, you've changed. Don't argue." She reached out to finger a lock of hair that rested on my shoulder. "I didn't know you'd started wearing your hair down."

That much, I supposed, made sense; when we spoke, it was nearly always at night, when I'd have let my hair down anyway for bed. "Yeah, well. It's no big deal." I turned and inclined my head towards the archway that led out of the room, adding, "Come on. Let's go sit somewhere and talk."

We settled in a lounge off the receiving hall, with a plate of cookies and mugs of _feeya_ delivered by a service drone. Sitting on a sofa across from Mom, I launched right into an explanation of my plan to save Tren from the self-righteous horde of her fellow humans, with all the enthusiasm I felt for our future together. I guessed that Mum would probably need some convincing, but I'd been sure that Mom, at least, would support me from the start. I mean, she was human; how could she not?

But to my disappointment, she regarded me skeptically all the time I was talking, even flinching a little when I got to the crux of the plan. When I finished, asking her what she thought, she set her mug on an end table and sighed. "Tak's not going to like it," she said.

"Well, I know _that_," I said lightly, striving to keep my hopes high. "Not at first. But she'll come around. I'm sure she'll come around, once I explain."

"Are you? I'd have thought after nine years, you'd know her better than that."

She pressed her lips together in a vaguely pitying smile. "Look, Vix, I'm not trying to rain on your parade here; obviously, you're crazy about this chick, and I think it's really cute that you want to play the heroine and spirit her away. I just don't know that your mum's going to see it the same way, and—well. It's her opinion that counts."

"Not necessarily," I argued. "You can convince Mum to do anything. You've told me so yourself."

"Okay, well I guess what I'm saying is that _I'm_ not going to fight this battle for you. Sure, I think it's cute that you think you're in love with whatsername—"

"Tren, Mom. And I don't _think_ I'm in love with her; I know I am."

"Whatever. Your little fling is all well and good, but it's not worth my bullying Tak into doing something she doesn't want to do – and trust me, babe, she won't. Besides, you're a big girl now, and it's time you started learning to go to bat for yourself; if you can command an entire planet, you can face your mum without me backing you up. As it is, you ought to consider yourself lucky just to be in a position to raise this issue with her. Most people wouldn't even get the chance to be shot down."

"Well, you can be pessimistic if you want," I said, frowning, "but I'm still going to try. I'm not going to let Tren be miserable just because Mum's uptight about this kind of thing. How would it hurt her, if we were to leave Earth? There are a billion Irkens dying for a directorship, and one less human on the labor force isn't going to make a difference."

Mom held up a hand. "I'm not going to talk about it. You've told me what you're going to do, and I've told you what I think. Save the rest of your argument for Tak; you're going to need it." She picked up her _feeya_ and took a sip, lingering at the rim of the mug to inhale its rich, sweet scent. "So Tren. I take it she wasn't eager to meet me?"

"Um, she's—not feeling well, I think."

"No, no, I get it. Traitor, sell-out, poser, skank. All these bitches are so jealous of me they can't see straight." Her lips curled into a smirk over the rim of her mug. "I guess you're serious about her, huh? Pretty big commitment, planning to take off into space with somebody after just a couple of months."

"Isn't that what you did?"

"Sure, when you weren't around and I wasn't so ancient. Sweet shit, talking about this stuff with you makes me feel _old_." Transferring her mug to one hand, she grabbed a cookie and popped it into her mouth, crunching as she spoke. "She's hot, right?"

"_Mom_! Ew!"

"What? If you're making this big of a deal about her, she should at least be hot. So—big tits, nice ass, what?"

"What would you know about_ hot_, anyway? You made a _big deal_ out of Mum when she was three feet tall and shaped like a pastry bag. Besides," I sniffed, nibbling daintily on the edge of a cookie, "Tren says it's not nice to say _tits_."

Mom snorted. "Hoboy." Tilting her mug to bring the last cooling drops of_ feeya_ to her mouth, she set it down, folded one leg over the other, and spread her arms out across the backrest of the couch, as if to clap the shoulders of two invisible people sitting on either side of her. "You said her officer caught you with her, right?" I nodded. "How were you dumb enough to let that happen?"

I shifted my gaze to the floor. "Didn't I already tell you?"

"No. You just told me you'd been meeting in secret, and a few days ago, her officer caught you. Officers aren't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs in the box – how'd Tren's manage to outsmart you?"

"It wasn't our _fault_," I protested. "We fell asleep! I'd been coming to the barracks at night, to her bed, and that night…after…" I reached for my _feeya_, hiding my quickly-warming face in the mouth of the mug. "We fell asleep."

Mom raised her eyebrows as understanding dawned on her face. "You were _sleeping_ with her?" she said, somehow managing to sound simultaneously neutral and foreboding.

"I—fell asleep with her, yeah."

"You know what I mean, Vix. You're fucking this girl? Having sex with her?"

At least with the steam from the _feeya_ moistening my cheeks, I could pretend that was why they felt so hot. Staring into my mug, I mumbled, "I don't know how that's any of your business."

"Look, hon, I honestly don't give a shit. You can eat this bitch til the cows come home, and I'll hand you a snorkel and a napkin. But there is something you should know." Her arms slid from the backrest and she leaned forward, lacing her hands on one knee.

"There's a big fucking shitstorm looming on the horizon for you and Tak right about now, and I bet you're both going to say some things you don't mean. She's going to piss you off, and you're going to want to piss her off right back. But for your own good, tell me – _promise _me – that no matter how angry you are, you're not going to let it slip that you slept with this girl."

I looked up from my _feeya_, brow knit in confusion. "Um, okay. I didn't even mean to tell _you _I slept with Tren, so why would I want to tell Mum?"

"It's not that I think you'll _want_ to tell her. It's that she's going to nix your plan and you're going to get really mad at her, so I'm guessing you're going to try to hurt her, upset her. You heard the things we said at your birthday party. People lash out when they're pissed."

I still wasn't entirely buying it. "Sure, but I feel like if I were that angry, I could come up with something meaner than that," I said doubtfully. "I don't see how my having slept with a human could hurt her that much. She's been sleeping with you for twenty years."

"Yeah, and she loves it. But if she finds out, she's not going to say to herself, 'oh, how lovely, this delightful human girl is showing my daughter the same pleasures Gaz showed me.' She's going to think 'this filthy human girl is corrupting my daughter the same way that child corrupted me, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let her be ruined like I was.'"

She worked her face into a scowl and affected Mum's accent speaking for her, and for an unpleasant moment I could picture how that scene would unfold. "Sure, it doesn't make sense, but I've known Tak for twenty years and I know how she is. It would probably be the worst thing you could say to her. And I'm warning you now, whatever you do, _don't_ say it; however bad things get, they'll be immeasurably worse if you do."

"Okay, Mom," I said, sighing. "But I still don't think this is going to get as ugly as you keep saying."

"Don't you? Tak suffered what she considers the greatest failure of her life on Earth. She spent six years rotting in its gutters. She hates it and everyone who lives here twice as much as they hate her, and you're about to ask her to set a precedent for undoing her revenge." Mom shook her head. "You'd better get your armor."


	54. The Shitstorm Raging

So Tak's back, for the first time in several chapters, and in fine form, too. I really enjoyed this chapter, because I find her the most fun to write when she's like this - dominating the dialogue in an argument or an address, swinging between cool-calm-and-collected mode and fire-breathing dragon mode (which was pretty much her modus operandi in-series anyway). Of course, the stakes here aren't exactly life or death...but when you're fifteen, there's nothing scarier than a pissed-off parent.

**53. The Shitstorm Raging **

"I know you aren't serious."

Mum sat in front of me on the bridge of the Massive, enshrined in her lounger. She hadn't risen to receive me, and she didn't rise now. She just sat, somehow seeming to look down on me even though she sat and I stood, a serpentine half-smile crooking one corner of her mouth. Unlike a real smile – though I barely knew how a real smile would look on her face – it didn't reach her eyes, and they looked as cold and hard as the eyes of her statue in the square.

"Would you care to hear how I know?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I know because no issue of mine would ever make such a foolish, audacious request. My daughter does not fraternize with slave races, and she does not ally herself with them above her own people; she would never neglect duties with which I had entrusted her to pursue a human factory drone.

"She does not waste opportunities or disrespect her superiors. The thought of defecting from her post would never enter her head." Her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the arm of her lounger, her smile thinning as it widened. "You're very amusing, Vix. But the time for telling jokes is over now."

Standing behind her, Mom didn't have to mouth _I told you so_; her eyes said it clear as a well-tuned transmission. My mouth felt dry, my tongue numb. "I love Tren, Mum."

Her smile faded, but didn't disappear. "Perhaps you're having an identity crisis, hm?" she said, her voice silky with condescension. "Your human side is clouding your judgment. Perhaps this is my fault, for sending you into that hotbed of human corruption.

"You've been living among humans for the first time, tempted by their vices and desires, and you've become confused; you believe yourself more human than you really are. I understand. I should never have put you in a position to question your allegiance—should have protected you from the weakness of your nature."

"It's not about _identity_, Mum. I would feel the same way about Tren if she were Irken or anything else. I don't understand why it's a problem for us to be together—why you can't deal with it."

At last, her smile vanished completely. "I am the Almighty Tallest," she snapped. "I do not _deal with_ anything. _I _make the decisions, and it is _your_ responsibility to deal with them."

I could feel my composure slipping, giving way to indignation. I knew getting emotional wasn't going to get me anywhere, but Mum wasn't even _trying_ to hear what I had to say. There was only so much anger I could swallow. "So what?" I demanded. "You're saying no just to lord your power over me? Give me one good reason – one _real_ reason – why I shouldn't be allowed to be with the person I love."

"You don't _love_ her, Vix. You are infatuated with her, and it will pass. You're only nine years into a very long life, and already you've decided you want to spend the rest of it with this girl. Who do you suppose is going to have to deal with the consequences when you figure out that it wasn't a good idea?"

She rose from her lounger and began to pace the bridge, circling me slowly with her hands clasped behind her back. "No doubt, the human in you will lead you to entangle yourself in a number of these relationships throughout the years, with humans as well as—other races. I will not attempt to interfere with them, but I will tell you this: I will afford no one special treatment just because you've taken to mooning over her.

"I will not set a precedent for freeing every slave who catches your fancy, and saddle the Empire with a small army of your cast-offs floating around the universe in Irken cruisers. I wonder, did you think at all about the implications of this request before you made it? Or do you simply—selfishly—expect me to clean up your messes even now? No matter the fallout, mm, so long as you have what you want when you want it?"

"It's not like that!" She glided behind me, like a snake along a branch, and I whirled around to face her. "You have no right to tell me how I feel! I love Tren, more than I've ever loved anything or anyone, and it's not going to _pass_!"

She regarded me disdainfully. "You believe that now."

"I _know _it now, and I will forever! Why are you _being_ like this, Mum? Why are you treating me like a little kid?"

"Because you have _behaved_ like one! I trusted you with an incredibly important job, Vix – a job millions of other people, vastly more qualified than you, have been working toward for _decades_ – and you threw it away to chase after a slab of human flesh. Do you even know what's going on on Earth right now? When was the last time you met with your supervisors, or conducted performance reviews? Have you done _anything_ to deserve your title over the past four months, or was this job just a vacation to you?"

Okay, so I'd been a little distracted by Tren over the past couple of months, but I couldn't believe she thought so little of me. "Of course I—"

"Be silent while I am speaking!" she practically shouted, and I braced for fear she would shove me off the platform. Instead, she came forward and grabbed my face in her hand, jerking my head up so that I was blinking into her eyes.

"When I was an ordinary soldier," she hissed an inch from my face, "clawing my way through the ranks at the Academy, sweating for every small victory, I would have killed just to be _considered_ for a directorship. If I'd found out that a spoiled little prat like you had been handed that job and spat on it, it'd have destroyed my faith in the Empire."

She let me go and strode back across the bridge, the tails of her gown swirling like stormclouds. For a venomous second, I wondered how anyone could love her, cruel and arrogant as she was—how Mom could even stand to be around her, much less hold her, kiss her, touch her like I'd touched Tren. It would be like making love to a shockrod. My lip curled at the thought.

"Tren says you're a monster, you know," I said, finally giving in to pettiness – figuring that if I couldn't convince her to see my side, at least I could give her a reason to lie awake tonight.

"She says you're a tyrant and your subjects are nothing but sheep. You do horrible things for no reason, like a little kid knocking over block towers—you murdered billions of humans and cast the rest into a living hell, just because you're bitter and you can't let go of the past. People try to kill themselves to escape what you've done, and you don't even care."

"You understand nothing," Mum said sharply. "I have done only what is my right and my duty as the leader of my people. You would do well to remember they're your people as well."

I lifted my chin. "I don't know who _my people_ are anymore."

I saw her tense for a moment, her hands curl into fists. Then – all of a sudden – all of her anger seemed to withdraw from her, in a single, startling blow. She began to stroll lazily along the edge of the bridge platform, a smug smile stretching out on her face like a lion in the sun. Beside the empty lounger, Mom watched her warily; I refused to let her intimidate me.

"You would be wise," she said coolly, addressing the crew in the ring, "to observe what has happened here, and to learn from what I now realize was a mistake. Would that I were infallible, instead of merely almighty.

"There exists one compelling argument against the commingling of races, and it stands before you on this bridge. Relationships like the one for which Director Vix requests a sanction should be prohibited, if for no other reason, then on the grounds that they could lead to the abomination of crossbreeding – producing more vile, ungrateful beings like this monstrosity I was foolish to create."

Mom sighed, shook her head, and rubbed the bridge of her nose, muttering something under her breath. Even if she'd spoken it aloud, I don't think I'd have heard it, over the sound of my blood boiling in my ears. Not once—not _once_—had anyone said anything so horrid to me, not in nine years of sidelong glances and insincere smiles.

I knew Mum could be vindictive, but I'd never imagined I would suddenly agree so vehemently with Tren. That I could hate her as much as I hated her now, standing there looking in my eyes and calling me a _mistake. _I'd never expected to be angry enough to do exactly what Mom had all but begged me not to – to want to say _the worst thing I could say to her_, and wipe that smirk off of her face.

"It doesn't matter what you think of me," I said quietly. "I don't need you. You don't have to love me, because Tren loves me more than anyone, outside and in. My mind…" I flashed a millisecond of a grin, so that she couldn't miss my meaning if she tried. "And my body."

All of the color drained from Mum's face, taking her satisfied smile with it. Mom's eyes widened and she clapped her palm to her forehead, hissing what sounded like _shit,_ _Vix! _For a second, Mum looked as if I could have blown her over with a breath—until all of her strength returned in a gust, and she stormed over and struck me across the face.

"YOU FILTHY LITTLE BEAST!" she roared, hardly giving me time to reel before she smacked my other cheek. "How dare you? How DARE you?! Polluting yourself with that piece of breathing garbage—desecrating this body _I_ made! If you're going to defile this flesh, you don't deserve it! _I should skin you alive_!"

She'd grabbed me by a hunk of hair and was slapping me turquoise when Mom came over to pull her off of me, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and steering her away. "Simmer down, Sticky," I heard her say as I stumbled back, breathless, my eyes stinging more than my face. "You don't have to beat the poor kid senseless."

"You can consider yourself fired!" Mum was still screaming. "You'll never see that Earth rat again! I'll lock you away forever, if that's what it takes—you won't see the outside of this ship until your ashes are ejected into space!"

I ran from the bridge with my eyes hot with tears, shaking with impotent rage, vowing I would be with Tren if it sent the whole of the Empire up in flames. _Mum can beat me half to death if she wants_, I told myself, gulping for breath as I tore through the corridors, _and I'll drag myself back. Let her lock me up; I'll break out. No matter what. No matter _what.


	55. J4 Advises, Vix Acts

Haha, wow. I actually didn't expect people to take so much offense at Tak's…err…"bitchiness." Maybe it's because I like Tak better than I like Vix. I mean, Tak's always been my baby, both in the series and in my work, and at this point I'm just so over Vix being a whiny, self-absorbed teenager that I'm not taking her side on anything…how many times have we all heard some overdramatic high-school girl crying about how she's in TWU WUV and NOTHING IS GOING TO KEEP US APART? Or maybe it's because I'm the one writing the story, so I see the shame and insecurity behind the bitchiness instead of just the bitchiness itself.

In any case, things are going to get worse before they get better, so I hope I don't turn anyone against Tak completely. Come next arc, she'll need all the sympathy she can get.

**54. J4 Advises, Vix Acts**

"Vix?" A few seconds after I knocked, the doors to J4's bedroom slid open, and she stood there looking at me with a mixture of pleasure and reproof. "Vix! Heard you coming back! Why not come see me first?"

Sucking up a sniffle, I pressed my lips together in a thin, bitter smile. "I had some business with my mum to take care of." She stepped aside and I trudged into the room, flopping despondently onto her bed. "You don't mind, do you? You weren't busy or anything?"

"Not busy. Is okay." She smoothed the bedclothes and sat beside me. PI, until then perched near the head of the bed, came over and plopped herself down between us, glancing silently from J4 to me. "Long time not seen you," J4 said, her hair spilling over her shoulders like a curtain as she leaned over me and blinked into my eyes. "Missed you, Vix. Staying now for good?"

I snorted weakly. "If Mum has her way."

"Oh." Understandably unsure how to respond to that, J4 tilted her head as she thought, then added, "How is Earth? You like your job?"

"Yeah. It was great, until now." I rolled over onto my stomach and propped my face in my hands. "It's just—I met this _girl_, J4," I sighed. "A human girl. Her name is Tren. She's _perfect_, absolutely perfect, beautiful and wonderful and when she speaks, I feel weak in the knees—I know you don't like humans, but you'd understand if you met her.

"I love her, and I want to take her away from Earth and be with her forever—but my mum is being horrible. I'll never see Tren again, if it's up to her. She says I'm wasting my opportunities, that I'm a selfish brat and how I feel isn't real. She thinks I'm having an _identity crisis_ – that I'm only interested in Tren because she's human, and I want to—I don't know—explore my urges or something.

"But it's _weird_, you know? I don't know what to think. Mum says I'm being disloyal to my people, but I'm not even sure who _my people_ are. So many humans suffered—still suffer—so much, and I don't know if I should care.

"Tren says we're not so different, she and I. She says the humans hate me and Mom twice as much as they hate Mum and everybody else, because they think of us as traitors—because we should know better. Because we're living in an empire built on the backs of our own people. But if Tren says humans are my people, and Mum says Irkens are my people, then…well, then my people have destroyed my people, and I don't know how I'm supposed to feel."

I flicked my eyes up from the bedspread, feeling a spate of sudden gratitude – first, that J4 existed at all, and second, that she'd moved past prowling around in the vivarium, to a point where we could actually talk about things like this. "You're the only other person in the universe who could possibly understand."

She shook her head. "Sorry, Vix," she answered, sounding genuinely regretful. "Can't understand." She pushed her hair over one shoulder and scowled at her lap. "Humans not my people."

I let out a short breath through my nose. "But they _are._ You _are_ half-human, even if you don't acknowledge it. Even if you wish you weren't."

"No," she said – not sharply, not angrily, just matter-of-factly. For someone who had outright murdered fourteen people, J4 was surprisingly level-headed most of the time. "Is a line," she went on, sliding her finger in a straight stripe through the air. "Very clear. One side you are _he, she, _other side you are _it_; one side you are rocked when you cry, other side muzzled. Humans know what is their kind and what is not. I know, too."

Folding my arms in front of me, I rested my cheek on my forearm, and chewed on my lip as I considered how to respond. Being as she _was_ so level-headed, I never had to worry much about offending J4 – but then again, the facts being what they were, it was hard not to second-guess my sensitivity.

"You know," I said softly, when a few moments of silence had passed, "not _all _humans are monsters. They don't all do the things those people did to you."

"Humans are humans. All the same."

"Come on. You can't really believe that." I raised my eyebrows. "You like my mom, don't you? She's human."

"Not human," J4 countered. "Not really. She makes life here, family here. Thinks more Irken than you. Looks human. Not."

Well. That was one point I had to concede. "You would like Tren if you met her," I said, unable to keep a note of wistfulness from creeping into my tone. It had been less than a day since I'd seen her last, and already I was aching for just a moment's glimpse of her eyes. "I'm sure you would."

"Happy that you like Tren. Happy that you are happy. But…" J4 lifted her shoulders in an apologetic shrug. "Can't understand."

"Okay, well—at least you have a good reason." I blew out my breath with a _pfft _sound, fluttering my bangs. "I mean, I'd probably hate humans too, if I were you. But Mum's just being a bitch for no reason. Mom yammers about 'her greatest failure', but that wasn't the humans' fault – they never did _anything _to her, and still she can't stand my being with one. She's such a hypocrite. I don't even think she cares about what kind of job I'm doing as Director, or what my _allegiance_ is; I think she just wants me to be miserable."

When I was little and things were different, hanging out with J4 had been like playing with a puppy. Now, it really was as if she were my big sister, because she was nearly always the voice of reason in our conversations.

Unless we were talking about certain things (like humans in general, or Dib, specifically), she was always the one encouraging me to be patient, to think rationally, advising against being rash and saying things I didn't mean. I guessed that after what she'd been through, the little things I got steamed over seemed like easy problems to solve.

"Not true," she said. "Is a line for her, too. Humans not her people, so not people at all; scares her to think you turning into something she doesn't know. Tren different from Commandergaz, doesn't think Irken. Like animal to Tallesttak."

Having picked up the habit of calling people by their full titles from PI, J4 tended to mash the names and the titles that preceded them together, and PI had given up trying to teach her otherwise. She'd told me she was happy enough that J4 no longer thought Mum's name was _Yesmytallest. _"Is like me. Can't understand."

"Well, what am I supposed to do about that? Abandon Tren to those awful people in the barracks, just because Mum _can't understand_ that she's not a rat?" I heaved a groan. "'I am the Almighty Tallest'," I sneered at no one in particular, halfheartedly imitating Mum. "'I make the decisions, and you deal with them.' I wish I were somebody else's kid – somebody who could only control me for so long."

"No, Vix. Shouldn't wish to be anything but what you are." Her hand came down and she sort of stroked my hair, smoothing her hand over the crown of my head. "Tallesttak loves you, I know. Just hard to show it."

"I don't know, J4." I bristled at the mere memory of the things Mum had said to me on the bridge – the terrible, cruel things, leaving her mouth with such pleasure. I wasn't sure I could even believe she'd ever _liked_ me, much less felt anything close to love.

"She called me a _mistake_," I mumbled into the pillow of my arms. "She said she never should have made me. Right there on the bridge, in front of Mom and everyone, and she wasn't even a little bit sorry. Does that sound like _love_ to you?"

"Mad at you. Didn't mean it."

I frowned. "How do you know?"

"Know about _mistake_. Heard it before. _Mistake_ is accident, bad thing, throw-away thing, don't think of again. _Mistake_ is not hard work. _Mistake_ is not thing with name, thing with home, thing with family; _mistake_ does not have a birthday party, or a job. _Mistake_ has no people for be disloyal to, no opportunities for waste. Nobody yells at or fights with _mistake_, because _mistake_ is not worth it." She gave me a small smile. "You are not mistake, Vix. Tallesttak will go around."

I managed to crack a smile back. "I think you mean _come_ around."

She nodded. "Come around."

For awhile longer, I lay there on my stomach, staring at J4's red bedspread while she and PI got back to the puzzle they'd been putting together before I knocked. What were my options? The way I saw it, I only had three.

I could be Mum's prisoner forever. I could be like a gracefully-wasting damsel in a storybook, needlepointing verses of love and loneliness, turning away visitors with a flick of my hand. I could do what I knew J4 would have me do, if it were up to her: swallow my pride, make up with Mum, and take a new job on a planet far away from Tren and all the rest of the humans.

Or I could do what I'd promised myself I'd do only minutes before, as I fled the bridge choking back sobs. I could take Tren and we could run away – so far away that even Mum's boots, however long her stride, couldn't crush me beneath their heels.

"I think I'm going to run away."

As I hoisted myself up off the bed and onto my feet, J4 blinked up from her puzzle, eyes wide. "What?"

"I have to stand up for myself, J4. I can't just let Mum kick me around like I'm one of her subjects. Tren is the most important thing in the universe to me, and if becoming a fugitive is the only way to be with her, then so be it. I'll do what I have to do." I glanced between her and PI. "You guys aren't going to tell on me, are you?"

J4 and PI looked at each other, and for the first time since I'd come in, PI spoke up. "We won't tell," she said, "but surely you know it doesn't much matter. Tallest Tak will find out you're gone whether we tell her or not, and when she does—well, she has the entire Empire at her disposal. Where do you expect to go that she can't reach you?"

"Somewhere. Anywhere. I don't know, I don't _care_—I just have to get _out _of here, as soon as I can. Every minute I spend on this ship makes me itch."

J4 sighed and set down the puzzle piece in her hand, gazing down at a half-finished image of a Nrayan pasture dotted with grazing figpli. "Wish you wouldn't run away."

"Why?" I asked, exasperated. "Because Mum loves me? Because she didn't mean what she said? Because I shouldn't wish to be _anything but what I am_—a pathetic little dog at the end of Mum's chain, barking and pawing and never getting anywhere?"

"No. Because worry about you."

She got up and came over to me, touched my shoulder and squeezed. Up close like this, I sometimes thought I could see the ghosts of the old scars on her face, before they'd been smoothed away under the laser. Sometimes remembered what it had been like always looking her in just her right eye, before Mom had inlaid a new left one like a big round ruby in an enamel cuff.

A lot of the time, I let myself forget that the broken, caged thing who had parroted my songs in the vivarium and the person – the walking, talking, clothes-wearing, nearly-normal person – who often gave me better advice than I gave myself were the same. But there were moments, like this one, when the two seemed almost to merge before my eyes, and it always left me a little shaken.

"Run away isn't easy," she said. "Run away is tired, hungry, scared. Is live by yourself, do what you can. Is bare teeth at every shadow. Don't want that for you."

"You ran away, didn't you?"

"Had to."

"And I _have to_, too. I'm a prisoner here, J4. Escape is my only option." I took her gently by the shoulders, trying to think how to explain. "Being without Tren is like—it's like being cut open. It's the worst pain you could ever know. Being here is _painful_ for me, and if I don't go, I'm going to waste away here, hurting more than I ever have in all my life."

J4 looked at me for a moment with eyes like one-way mirrors: taking in everything, revealing nothing. She had a knack for doing that, looking at you so you couldn't tell what she was thinking. After a minute she smiled, sort of sadly, and leaned in to hug me.

"You are my friend and only cousin, Vix," she murmured into my hair. "Want you to be happy."

I left J4's room and spent the rest of the night hiding out in mine, waiting for my parents to go to bed. Once they were out of the way, I could get down to the docking bay without a hitch. After all, the only people who knew I was on Mum's blacklist were the bridge crew, and none of them would be milling around the deck.

If I took my ship and went back down to Earth tonight, I could get there before anyone knew I wasn't allowed to be there, grab Tren from my complex and take off with several hours' head start. Maybe _run away isn't easy_, but this part would be.

When night had fallen, I slunk out of my room and down the hall, taking nothing with me but what I was already wearing. I took the less-traveled corridors to the docking bay, to make sure I accumulated as few witnesses as possible, but those crew members I did pass only nodded and marched on. When I took the hoverdisc down to the last level above the docking bay, it seemed I was in the clear.

Until. Until I rounded a corner and nearly dropped dead from shock, when I saw a small figure patrolling the hall ahead of me. The back of a figure, thankfully, so that I had time to catch my breath and scramble unseen back around the bend, but a person where no person should have had reason to be.

Or maybe not a _person_. Peeking around the corner, squinting to make out the shadow in the low light, I realized it was the silhouette of a SIR unit, its eyes casting a red glow over the floor before it. There were only two SIRs on the massive, as far as I knew, and this one definitely wasn't PI.

_Mimi, _I said breathlessly to myself, praying she wouldn't turn and come my way. _What on Irk is _she_ doing down here? _Could Mum have sent her down here before she went to bed, to make sure I didn't try to slip out? Did it matter whether or not she had? Mimi would know I wasn't supposed to be leaving, no doubt, and she would wake Mum; she'd do it even if I begged her not to, because it was in her programming. She had to act in Mum's best interests, which tonight would mean ratting on me.

She couldn't be convinced and I doubted I could take her out, even with the arsenal in my pak. Even a standard-issue SIR came fortified against all but the highest-grade pak-based weapons; Mimi being Mimi, she'd be impervious to all of them. I could probably shut her down for awhile if I had something heavy to hit her with, but the corridors leading to the docking bay weren't exactly furnished with marble statues. _Shit. Shit! What am I supposed to _do_? _

Then – all of a sudden – I remembered. Relief eased the tightness in my chest. Retreating into a crouch under cover of the bend, I opened the storage panel on my pak as quietly as I could, and rooted around with one silver limb until its tip curled around a certain small bundle: the wavebreaker Mum had given me a few birthdays ago, when she'd finally decided I was old and practiced enough.

I hadn't really needed it then (what use is a device that makes other people do what you want them to, when you get everything you want anyway?), but I had squirreled it away in my pak, and forgotten about it until now.

_I believe a wavebreaker is most useful as a means of interfacing with technology, _Mum had said, that first time she tried to teach me to use it. As I passed it from the pak's limb to my hand, and applied it just like she'd taught me – rear anchor point, frontal anchor point, no slack in between – I felt a jolt of perverse invigoration, imagining the look on her face when she learned how her lessons had backfired.

I peered around the corner and zeroed in on the back of Mimi's head. Mum had called this part of wavebreaking _advanced, _but really, it was easier to access a machine than a living being. Harder to know what to do once you got in, maybe, but easier to harness electrical impulses than to bend brain waves.

A SIR had no real will to break. Just a lot of ones and zeroes swirling through its headspace, waiting to be snatched and plunked down in the order that would make them sing.

It happened in the space of seconds. I saw Mimi stiffen as the connection was made. But she didn't have time to turn, to identify the intruding signal, before all of those ones and zeroes were plinking neatly into place; I could actually feel the strength leave her, even before I saw her arms fall limp at her sides. I straightened up, knees quivering, palms slick, dizzy with a rush like piloting a ship for the first time. Afraid to speak aloud, afraid not to speak at all, I mouthed the words _all systems shut down._

A white-blue light snapped through the air in front of me, and Mimi toppled. The_ clang_ rang out through the hall. My pulse racing, I hurried down the corridor to she if she was really out, and sure enough, her eyes had gone dark; she was just a crumpled heap of metal now.

I knew it wasn't as if I'd _hurt_ her – she would be fine, once someone came along and restarted her, in the morning when I'd be screwed anyway – but still I felt the tug of guilt, looking down at her. It wasn't her fault Mum was a jerk.

"I'm sorry, Mimi," I whispered as I peeled off the wavebreaker. "But I said _no matter what_."


	56. Tak's Challenge

The last little moment between Vix and Tak in this chapter is an image I had in my head a long time before I got to put it into words, or even into specific context - like the image of Tak in the hollow interface room in chapter 23, or of Gaz and Tak duking it out in chapter 47, it was one of those flashes of creative clarity that help shape a story before it's written.

**55. Tak's Challenge**

_Gaz speaking_

It was bad when Vix asked Tak to let her ditch her job for her human girlfriend. Worse when she told Tak she and said girlfriend had been humping like rabbits. Worse still when we woke the next morning to realize that she'd snuck out in the middle of the night, made a pit stop on Earth, and high-tailed it down the intergalactic highway.

But when Tak found out what she'd done to Mimi, the shit really hit the fan.

_THAT MISERABLE, DECEITFUL, CONTEMPTIBLE WASTE OF AN ABORTION! _she was howling, raging like a hurricane, practically blowing out my eardrums with every shriek. _I SHOULD HAVE EXTERMINATED HER WHILE I HAD THE CHANCE! _

_She won't live to see the end of this, mark my words! She won't live to hear me try to talk sense into her again! I've seen what she does with the gifts I give her; she doesn't deserve the gift of another breath. She and her vile human consort will be together when their skins hang side-by-side on my wall. _

Even when Mimi herself sent her a tempering glance, speaking to her on their private wavelength, Tak glared back and snapped, _I don't care! This time, that little ingrate has gone a step too far. She has defied my orders and violated my property, and she will not live to tell of it._

_Well, ungrateful or not, _I pointed out, _if she's not brain-dead, she'll have disabled her ship's tracker. How do you plan to find her?_

A pleasureless smile nicked her face like a razor. _She isn't aware of it, _she said, _and neither are you, but when I commissioned Vix's ship, I had it equipped with a remote disabler. Even if I can't track her, I can shut off her ship's engines from anywhere in the universe, and it's not hard to hit a stationary target. _

_Wait—you're going to shut off her engines? Midflight? Isn't that—oh, I don't know, _dangerous_?_

She sniffed dismissively. _No. The disabler doesn't cut the power outright; it brings the ship down to the nearest landing-point and prevents it from starting up again. _Whipping suddenly around, she strode down the corridor towards the bridge, leaving Mimi and I little choice but to follow her. _You needn't have worried, _she growled as we walked, her eyes near-black with fury. _I wouldn't deprive myself of the pleasure of dealing with her personally._

Tak spoke to the guard stationed at the Earth port where Vix was last seen, and we took the Massive in the direction she'd been heading. Meanwhile, she ordered the rest of the Armada to fan out around us, sending the retainer vessels to check every conceivably-hospitable body within a sizeable radius of our course.

We would cover as much ground as we could, processing the retainers' reports and running roving scans for Vix's ship's power signature. I shook my head as I watched it all unfold, noting (not unsarcastically) the momentous thing happening here: for what had to be the first time in Irken history, the entire Armada had been dispatched to discipline a rebellious fifteen-year-old.

It didn't take us long to track her down that way. By the time we would've ordinarily been going to bed, we were docking near a planet called Hwar, and taking a retainer vessel down to the small (frankly ugly) moon from which Vix's signal emanated.

_We _meaning me, Tak, and a handful of crew members, because by that point I guess she'd gotten so used to being constantly-attended that it seemed undignified to go anywhere without an entourage. I didn't expect Vix to have stayed with her ship, and when we found it, I was somewhat pleased to see I had been right. At least she had that much common sense.

Not that it would help her at all. Bursting angrier than ever from the Queen of the Universe-sized hole she'd lasered out of the side of Vix's ship, Tak grabbed a bioscanner from one of her attendants and stormed off through the ruins of long-abandoned Hwaran colonies, swiping the scanner in an X over every doorway. I scrambled after her, listening to her curse under her breath. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

"There you are, you revolting little maggot!"

My eyes snapped up to see her disappear into a doorway, and I lengthened my strides to catch her. It was a good thing I did, too, because the second I entered the dilapidated little room where Vix had chosen to hide - a second before Tak's entourage piled in – was the second Tak moved in on her prey, much the way she'd advanced on Dib in his bedroom twenty years ago. If I hadn't shot an arm out and grabbed her by one of her pak's limbs, en route to clash with those already sprouting from Vix's back—well. I don't even want to know what would've happened.

"What are you doing?!" Tak shouted and whirled on me, fighting to work her limb out of my grip, glowering at my closed fist as if she could burn through it with her eyes alone.

I raised my eyebrows. "What are _you_ doing?"

My gaze followed hers to where Vix stood pressed up against the wall, looking simultaneously infuriated and terrified, her pak's limbs still poised to defend herself and the human girl clutching her. The girl – Tren, I supposed – was white with fear and disheveled from their flight, but she had striking blue eyes and her body wasn't bad, either. I could see why Vix thought she was pretty.

"Preparing to excise this tumor in the flesh of the Empire," Tak spat without glancing back at me, flexing her pak's limbs threateningly,

I sighed. "You are _not _going to kill your own daughter, Tak. Okay? Let's take that option off the table right now." I let her go, looking meaningfully at her, then at Vix. Tak's attendants watched wide-eyed from the doorway, probably wishing they'd brought popcorn. "Can we all just act like civilized people and put our weapons away? Surely we can do this – whatever _this _is – bloodlessly."

Vix and Tak stood glaring at each other a moment, hesitant to withdraw their weapons. They really were most alike when they were angry – stubborn and vicious in exactly the same way, with exactly the same scowl slivering their eyes and denting their foreheads. Finally, they both backed off, Vix swallowing and steadying her breathing, Tak closing her eyes as she collected herself.

"You will turn over the girl," Tak said as coolly as she could. "She will be returned to Earth, and you will return to the Massive. _Now._"

Vix wrapped her arms protectively around Tren. "No," she said in English, evidently wanting Tren to be as much a part of this as she was.

Tak's eyes widened, then narrowed. "What?"

"I said _no_, Mum. I'm not coming back. Not without Tren."

"You will speak to me in your mother tongue, Vix," Tak hissed, "or you will never speak again." I believed it, and Vix must have believed it, too, because a little of the color drained from her face. Mad as Tak was, I could see her shoving her hand into Vix's throat and ripping her tongue out by the root. "Now detach yourself from the girl and come with me. We will not discuss it."

When Vix answered, her voice was softer, and she did switch to Irken. But she didn't drop Tak's gaze, and she didn't back down. "No."

I reached out and took Tak by her upper arm, not sure she wouldn't boil over and forget our ceasefire. She frowned at me and jerked away, then – looking again to Vix – rearranged her face into a sneer. "What will you do, then?" she said imperiously, lifting her chin in indication of our squalid surroundings. "Stay here? Live in this dung heap forever, hiding from me? I wonder—was that what you promised this girl, when you stole her from her pod?"

Vix's eyes hardened. "Not forever," she said, and I could tell by her tone of voice that she was about to say something particularly nasty. "Just until the Irken people figure out how stupid it is to put a petty, self-centered, hypocritical bitch like you in charge just because she's _taller _than everybody else, and take back the power they dumped into your lap."

It was a good shot, I had to admit. Better even than she knew. And unlike her little revelation on the bridge, I hadn't led her to this one. She understood on her own that calling Tak illegitimate, when a piece of her still questioned her own legitimacy every time she passed a mirror, would land harder than any physical blow.

That to mock this body that was her sovereignty, this body that was such a big part of how we knew her and still such a small part of how she knew herself, was to reduce her to something she wasn't even sure existed. I heard Tak's breath stick in her throat, saw her blink rapidly. Then, she squared her shoulders, and drew her lips back over her teeth like a snarling dog.

"By then, this girl will be long dead, and you will be sitting here cradling her bones, wondering how the best years of your life passed you by. How you wasted your chance to do anything of value, anything of meaning, and all you have left is to wait for death."

She didn't wait for Vix to respond. "We're done here," she snapped as she turned to me.

Tak's attendants hurried to clear the doorway and she stalked out onto the street, the tails of her gown stirring up plumes of dust in her wake. Before I could follow her, I heard a little noise from the wall where Vix stood holding Tren – a noise that reminded me of the sounds Vix used to make when she was tiny, the hiccupping whimpers against my shoulder when she'd been crying and was only just calming down.

I turned to see her blinking at me with wide, desperate eyes. "Mom," she said, then paused, struggling to think how to go on. "Please."

I could hear an echo of myself in her voice, standing in a corridor on the Massive begging Tak to be herself again. Knew I couldn't give her any more now than Tak had given me then. "I'm sorry, Vix," I sighed, turning out my palms. "I said you'd have to fight your own battle here, and I meant it. I couldn't help you now if I tried."

I rejoined Tak back on the bridge of the Massive, where Hwar and its ugly moon were displayed on the viewscreen. "I should just vaporize the whole of that filthy moon right now," she was grumbling, fingering the button in the arm of her lounger. "I won't take another second of abuse from that traitorous larva. Mark me, I _won't_."

"I have a better idea." I reached down and peeled her fingers off the button. "We'll dock here tonight and you can sleep on it. When you wake up in the morning, you'll know what to do."

"I already _know_ what to do, child. I—" She stopped short when she saw me frowning down at her, telling her in no uncertain terms that I wasn't interested in hearing another of the six thousand and twelve ways she'd devised to murder our daughter. "Well, I don't know how you expect me to sleep like this," she muttered instead.

Which was probably the only thing in this situation I _could_ do something about. "Who do you think you're talking to here?" I said, grinning suggestively. "We'll work some of that tension out, no problem."

"Ugh. I'm not even in the mood."

"You think that now."

Eventually, I did get her too breathless to gripe about what a disappointment Vix had become, and her face twitching loose from her scowl. When I'd administered my special brand of physical therapy to our joint satisfaction, I shoved her over onto her side and snuggled up against her, and felt her breath thicken with sleep even before I dropped off myself.

I must have slept soundly, because the next thing I knew, I was waking to light shining through my eyelids. My eyes blinked open to find all of the lights in our room switched on, and the mattress beside me empty and already cold. Not only was Tak up, she'd _been_ up, doing God knew what while I lay there passed out. I rubbed my eyes as I sat up and glanced around the room.

"Good, you're up," Tak said briskly, sweeping out the door of her dressing room already decked out in her gown. "Hurry up and get dressed. I won't have you delaying me any further."

"Okay, okay. Jeez." I slid out of bed and padded over to the dressing room, pausing to glance over my shoulder at her. "I take it you thought of something?"

"Oh, yes." A venomous smile stretched her lips. "You know, you were right, child. The moment I opened my eyes this morning, I knew _exactly_ what to do."

"Do I get to hear what it is?"

"The sooner you're dressed and ready to accompany me back to Hwar's pathetic excuse for a moon, the sooner you'll find out."

So for the second time in two days, Tak and I and a heap of attendants (a different bunch from yesterday – we'd appeared on the main deck just in time to catch them drawing straws for who would get to see the show today) went down to the Hwaran moon, in a procession much more decorous than yesterday's rampage.

Knowing where Vix was and what she was going to do when we found her, Tak was composed, her bearing regal. She strode down the street with its crumbling pavement and stinking gutters as if it were an Irken receiving hall, with a statue of her erected between every pair of pillars.

Vix hadn't left the hovel where we'd found her, likely knowing as well as I did that it would only prolong the inevitable. We entered to see Tren huddled on a blanket spread out in the corner, and Vix standing facing us in the center of the room, her arms crossed over her chest. "Well?" she addressed Tak.

"I believe I have devised a compromise with which we will all be satisfied," Tak replied evenly, smiling at Vix's obvious surprise. "And I am prepared to offer you a choice."

Vix, looking more rattled than she would've been had Tak stormed in screaming and flinging threats, nodded numbly. Tak's smile widened. "You may return to the Empire," she went on, "with all of your privileges reinstated – with this whole debacle forgotten – so long as you relinquish the human girl, and your position as Director on Earth."

Vix, frowning, opened her mouth to refuse with what I was sure was no shortage of passion. Tak lifted a finger to silence her. "Or you may go back to Earth together, as equals. If you are so intent on giving your life to a human, you may live as if you were entirely human yourself – sleep in a barracks, work in a factory, and be known by an identification number tattooed on your arm."

Vix stood there staring at her, paler than I'd ever seen her. I understood Tak's smile now. If she couldn't kill Vix, this was the next best thing; to Tak, being part of a slave race was a fate worse than death. And I was sure (was sure _she _was sure) that that was the path Vix would choose. If I knew her at all, I knew that for her, giving up this girl she was so crazy over – that, and admitting that Tak had gotten the better of her, that she couldn't meet her mum's challenge – was a fate _worse_ than a fate worse than death.

For a minute, there was absolute silence, like in one of those old Westerns when the heroic cowboy and the sneering bad guy face off on the main street in town. I half-expected a tumbleweed to blow by. "You're trying my generosity, Vix," Tak said. "Make your decision quickly, or I will make it for you."

Vix took a deep breath. "I'll do anything to be with Tren."

"Very well." Tak's voice crackled with poisonous pleasure. She'd placed her bets wisely, and now they were paying off. "What are you waiting for?" she said, turning on the cluster of attendants at the door. "You're standing in front of a pair of fugitive slaves from a conquered world. _Apprehend them_."

Tak's entourage jumped to attention and swarmed into the room, surrounding Vix and a very confused-looking Tren. As their hands were tugged behind their backs and locked into laser-cuffs, Vix tried to explain what was going on in English, but I had no idea how much Tren absorbed before Tak began to issue further orders.

"Take the former Director back to Earth with the human girl. See that all non-essential functions of her pak are disabled, then have her processed and assigned to a pod – the same as this girl, if you can. After all," Tak said sweetly, with a less-than-sweet smirk, "we wouldn't want her to have fallen so far for nothing, would we? We must keep up our end of the deal."

Tak stood aside to watch as her attendants hustled Vix out into the street, pulling Tren to her feet and pushing her along a few steps behind. "You ought to be proud of yourself, Vix," Tak commented as they passed her. "I'm certain you'll contribute more to the Empire as a slave than you ever did as a director."

Vix said nothing. Didn't even look at Tak. Just hitched her chin and stared straight ahead, dredging up every last ounce of dignity she had left. Tak narrowed her eyes at Vix's back in the doorway, the smile dropping momentarily from her face—and suddenly, in a silver blur, one of her pak's limbs shot out and grabbed Vix by the collar of her dress, knocking over the attendants that flanked her as it dragged her to Tak's feet.

Literally – Tak jerked her to her knees, pinning her cheek to the floor, and held her there. After pausing a moment to appreciate the sight of her insubordinate daughter bowing before her, she leaned down to look Vix in the eyes.

"Yes, my Tallest," she purred.

Everyone in the room held a collective breath. Even Tren, who didn't understand a word of what was being said, seemed to sense that something important was happening here. It was a battle of wills they were fighting, but more than that, it was another challenge – and to her credit, Vix didn't back down.

"Yes, my Tallest," she muttered, flicking her gaze to the ground.

Tak smiled, straightened up, and retracted the silver limb, leaving Vix to pick herself up and let the attendants lead her through the doorway. When the last of the bunch had gone, I approached Tak, expressionless, unspeaking. She slid an arm around my shoulders, and together we walked out.


	57. Returning to Earth

**56. Returning to Earth**

_Vix speaking_

For the fourth time in my life, I found myself on a ship heading for Earth. Three times before, I had been standing in front of a viewscreen on the main deck, watching as the ground neared; this time, I sat in the darkness of the hold, feeling instead of seeing our descent. Imagining the red sky opening and closing like the lid of a box, sealing me inside.

Tren and I hardly talked all the way from Hwar, huddled side-by-side in a cell illuminated only by the red glow of the laser-cuffs. I didn't know about her, but I felt too nauseous to speak. I curled up into a ball, put my head between my legs, and barely moved until we landed.

Until the doors slid open and the light poured in like a bucket of sterilized water-substitute, dumped suddenly over our heads. A pair of crew members trooped in, pulled us up and shoved us out, still blinking the stars from our eyes.

When we disembarked, one of the crew members escorted Tren back to her pod, while the other took me to be processed. In a cool, dank room I'd never seen during my days as Director, an attendant sliced my dress up the back, and it fell away from my skin like the rind of a peeled fruit. She cut away my leggings and yanked off my boots, leaving me standing there shivering in only my undergarments.

Those, too, I had to take off to be sanitized, which I discovered meant standing in a small room with bright lights and coughing as jets of disinfectant gas filled the air. It wasn't the same gas they'd have used on the humans, but it stung hitting my skin all the same.

Afterwards, an attendant herded me into another room and tossed a set of clothes at me – standard-issue undergarments, white socks and soft-soled shoes, and a grey jumpsuit folded into a crisp square. I dressed as quickly as I could, eyeing the attendant's holstered shockrod. When I had finished she approached me, jerked my right arm away from my side, produced a silver gun and lasered a number into my skin: 2708-850.

Trooping across the grounds to the barracks, wincing as I rubbed the burning patch of skin on my forearm, glaring up at Mum's statue when we passed through the square, I was told how I had come by that number. Apparently, thanks to a loose strip of metal lining on a bunk-column and an oversight on Effa's part, a recent attempt at theft of the Empire's property had been uncommonly successful. As soon as they washed the blood out of the mattress, 850's bed would become mine.

It was mid-afternoon, so I was taken to the factory, not the barracks. My escort didn't even give me time to brace myself before he steered me through the doors. "Officer Effa," he addressed her when she came over, looking at me with fiendish delight. He indicated me with a nod. "The newest addition to your pod."

"Of course," she purred. "Feel free to go now. I'm sure I'll find something for her to do."

When my escort had gone, Effa grabbed me by a lock of my hair hanging over my shoulder, yanking my head down so hard my scalp began to throb. "You must be the stupidest little swine in the entire universe," she hissed into my ear, clearly relishing every word. "Tallest Tak will commend me for giving you what you deserve."

I spent the rest of the day sitting on 850's stool, feeling nine hundred and ninety-nine pairs of eyes boring into me from all directions, and fumbling with the tasks with which the conveyor belt presented me. Graphics application wasn't as easy as it looked.

First of all, my stencil was mounted on a jointed arm, which never seemed to turn the right way or stay in place once I got it there; I could hear the girls around me snickering when the knob that was supposed to lock it broke off in my hand. Second, the paint gun was stronger than I'd expected. Once I finally got the stencil where it was meant to be, I pressed too hard on the valve and the gun went whipping everywhere, flailing at the end of its tube and spraying me in black paint. Cue more snickers.

Plus, the conveyor belt kept moving down before I had finished (sometimes even started) the task in front of me, resulting in a rapidly-growing pile of my detritus in the scrap bin instead of on the shelves waiting to be packed for shipping. By the time the buzzer sounded for dinner, I was exhausted, covered in paint, and hadn't managed to successfully stamp a single thing.

_No matter, _I thought bitterly on the way to the mess, trying to keep in step even as the girl behind me tried to shove me into the next row. _I'm tired of Mum's insignia, anyway._

I was surprised by how unpleasant it was actually being _hungry. _It used to be that I'd only eaten for pleasure, when I felt like it; now, after less than a day with a deactivator disc attached to my pak, I was aware of a painful emptiness in my stomach. To make matters worse, the tray I picked up at the mess was far from appetizing.

I must have watched Tren eat her rations fifty times, but it had never occurred to me how unappealing they were until I was scooping them up in my own spork. Designed to maximize nutrition (thus energy, thus productivity) while minimizing cost, the food served in the mess came in varying shades of brown and grey, in textures from soupy to gelatinous, and was bland save for a burnt-rubber aftertaste.

My only comfort was sliding in next to Tren on the bench, as I set my tray down next to hers on the table. "Hi," I said, doing my best to be cheerful for both of us. She didn't look any happier than she had on the ride back to Earth – or for that matter, since we'd run away in the first place. "I haven't seen you all day."

Her hand was resting limply on the table, her fingers curled into her palm so that it looked like an unbloomed lily. I reached out and placed my hand over hers, squeezing gently. She didn't move, or look up at me – just stared down at my hand covering hers. "Why do you want to do this?" she said, sounding hollow.

"So that I can be with you." I took a deep breath. "It'll be worth it, Tren. I know."

She didn't say anything.

At least my being around had taken the focus off of her. No one bothered pushing Tren around anymore – they were all too busy harassing me. In the mess alone, I had my hair pulled, my spork swiped, and my face slammed into the glop on my tray.

That night in the barracks, I was nearly kicked off the ladder climbing up to my bed on the third level, where I found that someone had already stolen my blanket and pillow. I had thought I would sneak down to Tren's bed after lights-out, but even on my hard bare mattress, I dropped off to sleep in a matter of moments. Exhaustion – another unfamiliar sensation – swept over me and shut me off like a switch.

The next morning, I woke to a hot jolt of pain in my side, a crackle of electricity seizing my limbs. Fuzzy-brained and barely aware of what was going on, I shrieked and scrambled up in bed, to see Effa floating on a hoverdisc beside my bunk-column.

"I won't warn you again, 850," she snapped, waving her still-warm shockrod in my face. "Learn to wake up with the rest of the pod, or next time it'll be a lashing. Do you understand me?"

I nodded blearily, blinking around to see that I was the only one left in her bunk-column. _But it's not my fault, _I grumbled inwardly as I descended the ladder, into a mass of humans tittering in their lines. _I've never had to wake up to a buzzer before. _

"You're not getting any special privileges here," Effa sneered as her hoverdisc touched down beside me, as if she had read my mind.

I guess in a way, I had hoped to wake up and find that it was all a dream, and I'd stir in my bed in the director's residence relieved that none of it had really happened. That I had never been dumb enough to get caught with Tren that morning, to tell Mum and try to convince her I was right, to believe we had any chance of escaping her. As I fell into step with the other girls, I swallowed hard, forcing myself not to go to pieces at the thought of an eternity of this.

The days dragged. Life was nothing but food, work, and sleep, repeated ad infinitum, broken up only by the cruelty of the human girls and stolen moments with Tren. Even those, though, became less comforting as time wore on. Not because of me – every morning, when the thought of facing another day made the panic rise in my throat, I looked across the barracks for a glimpse of her face, and told myself _she's worth it _– but because of her.

She became distant, dull. At night, when I slipped into her bed, she looked at me as if looking at something behind me, though there was never anything there. In the mess, I would sit with her and place my hand over hers, and it lay there cool and still. Like a smooth white stone, lifeless in my palm.

Until the day when she moved it away.

It had only been a few weeks since I'd begun serving my term on Earth. I had finally started to get the hang of things at the factory, not that I ever got close to my quota; I ended up on the receiving end of a lot of beatings, because of that and because Effa hated me. The first time had been terrifying – me cowering between my stool and 849's, trying to scramble away from Effa's riding crop, crying out under the rain of stinging blows. Eventually, though, I got used to it, and was only glad for the dearth of mirrors to show me the welts on my back.

That day at lunch, I sat down and set my tray beside Tren's, and went to touch her hand like I always did. She removed it from my reach. Not even subtly, not even sliding it off the table, or moving to pick up her spork; she just moved her hand very deliberately away from mine, and scooted away from me on the bench.

"What's wrong?" I asked, worried, at first, for her.

"Nothing. I just…" Her voice trailed off. She was staring at the untouched rations on her tray, her hair hanging over her shoulders and hiding her face behind a golden wall. "This isn't working, Vix."

"What's not working? What do you mean?"

"I don't want to do this anymore." She pushed her hair behind her ear and glanced up from her tray, looking me in the eyes. "It was all right for awhile, I guess, but what did you think? You were going to come here and be part of the pod, and we were going to be together forever?"

I felt suddenly, sickeningly cold. "You're—breaking up with me?"

"It's just—_weird_ now, that's all. We're too different. Maybe for a little while, I thought it was kind of fun, being with somebody so—well, alien. Maybe before, I thought the gap between us was just because of our circumstances – that it might be different if we were equals, that we might understand each other then.

"But we're too _different_, Vix, we're just too different. I can't _make_ you human, and you'll never know what it's like. It was all right for awhile," she repeated, as faces at the tables around us began to turn to watch, as the hum of conversation softened and then stopped, "but you—you were never somebody I was going to spend my whole life with. You knew that, didn't you?"

The world seemed fragmented, coming apart before my eyes. My guts were twisted up in knots. _She can't mean it, _I kept telling myself in my head. _She can't. _"You're not serious."

"Look, it's not a big deal." Laughter was beginning to move through the crowd around us. My tormentors in the pod couldn't have thought up anything worse than this. "Don't you dare act like I'm the jerk here," Tren hissed, her voice dipping into its old venom – sounding like it had when we'd first spoken in my quarters, back when we had only just met and the future seemed as beautiful as she was – for a second before evening out. "People get together and break up all the time."

"You can't do this to me." More laughter. A girl behind me cooed _oh, how sad; poor little princess can't have everything she wants. _I wanted to turn and grab her by the collar and shout _for the last time, I'm not a fucking princess! _Sure as hell not now, anyway.

"I-I gave up my whole life for you," I said weakly. "I ran away from home because of you, I let my mum _humiliate_ me because of you—I'm a _slave_ because of you, and it's 'not a big deal'?"

_Did you hear that? _a voice a few tables away sneered. _She's a _slave._ How horrible! _

"I never asked you to do any of those things," Tren said, sharply now. "I never asked you to do _anything_ for me. You were the one who picked me out of the crowd—the one who badgered me into starting this thing with you—and _you_ were the one who decided I was worth making yourself a slave. Don't get pissed at me because you made this into something it wasn't."

"But I—b-but I—" The world blurred as my eyes filled with tears, my throat blocked by a building sob. "I love you, Tren."

She sighed like I'd just told her she'd have to work an extra hour tonight. "Yeah, well, I don't love you."

My head was swimming, my body shaking, and I wasn't sure I wouldn't fall if I tried to stand but I knew I had to get _out._ Somewhere, anywhere, just not here. I couldn't stand another second in the mess, with titters and jeers filling the air around me, with Tren shaking her head and turning back to her tray. I couldn't bear to be near her and know I couldn't touch her, couldn't even look at her without a sidelong frown—to know that I was nothing to her, and she was still everything to me.

So I got to my feet as best I could, and like I'd run from the bridge on the Massive, I ran. Plowing through the spectators that had gathered in the aisles, choking back sobs, I ran until the doors to the mess slid open before me, and I plunged into the hot red day.


	58. The Statue in the Square

**57. The Statue in the Square**

I ran, without really knowing where I was going, until my legs gave out in the square in the officers' compound. I was too upset to appreciate the irony: I'd come to Earth to get away from Mum, and here I lay collapsed at the foot of her statue.

I pulled myself, sniffling, onto the lowest tier of its base, and rested my wet cheek against the cool black stone. Staring out at the empty square – the squat structures of the compound, the flat straight streets that divided them, the huge scarlet sky looming above it all – I struggled to form a picture of my world.

What was I now? Only a slave. One faceless speck among billions. I wasn't anything close to a princess, nor anybody's daughter, anybody's cousin, anybody's friend. I wasn't Director Vix, and I wasn't _Vix-beloved-by-the-Tallest. _I remembered the pet name PI called J4: _one-beloved-by-no-one. _

Tren had been my only reason for existing in this place. Now that I didn't have her, everything seemed horrifically meaningless. I was stuck here, in the living hell I'd chosen, without her light to drive away the darkness; I was stuck here and I would never feel her hands on my skin again, hear her voice saying my name. I would never love anyone again, I was sure.

And even if I could have, what was the point? Food, work, sleep. Food, work, sleep. Indefinitely. Maybe forever. Curled up at the base of Mum's statue, I could see it sanding me down over the years, leaving nothing left for anything so foolish as love.

I lifted my head, folding my sleeve over my hand to wipe my face. Above me, Mum's silhouette was monolithic, discs of red light reflected in her purple eyes. "I suppose you would be happy about this, wouldn't you?" I muttered, too miserable to realize how ridiculous I sounded talking to a statue. "You were right. You said it would pass, and guess what? It's passed. Tren hates me, and I'm completely alone."

Looking up into Mum's unblinking eyes, I almost wished she could answer me, even if all she did was yell. I longed for the sound of a familiar voice. "Maybe I should just come home. Tell Effa I've repented and I want to beg your forgiveness, and maybe then you'll let me come home and rot in my room for the rest of eternity."

I couldn't see how that would be any better than wasting my life here. It would be _easier_ – I wouldn't be beaten or bullied, or have to work fifteen hours a day, and I'd never feel tired or hungry again – but it wouldn't make me any happier.

For nine years, I had been perfectly content to loll about the Massive doing whatever I felt like doing, sometimes nothing. But once I'd met Tren, I'd known desire, I'd known direction, I'd known _purpose. _Being with her had made me wonder how I'd lived for so long without something to be passionate about.

In a way, I thought it would be better for me to stay here, where at least there was the daily grind to distract me. At home, I would have nothing to do but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about how nothing seemed to matter anymore.

And if I went home—well, it was a lot easier to tell Mum's statue she'd been right than to tell Mum herself. The thought of kneeling at her feet and begging forgiveness made me break out in hives.

I kept thinking of how she'd jerked me to my knees, ground my face into the dirt as if she thought it belonged there. The disdain in her eyes when she leaned down to speak to me, the ice in her smile. How satisfied she'd been hearing me address her as _my Tallest, _as if the greatest reward of parenthood was wielding dominion over your child.

She'd turned on me so quickly, so cruelly, the moment a wedge came between us. It was like she'd taken a hammer and beaten it in as far as it would go, until we were more queen and subject than mother and daughter.

I laid my head back down and closed my eyes, trying to remember a time when things were better between us. When I was little and Mum would play with me, sometimes, if she wasn't too busy and was in a good mood. When she'd let me ride on her shoulders holding her antennae, pretending I was even taller than she was. When I would fall asleep between her and Mom in their bed, breathing in the faintly spicy smell of her skin (Mom said it reminded her of something called cardamom), and feeling as warm and safe and happy as I thought it was possible to feel.

Safe. That was one thing I'd always felt around Mum, safe. She always seemed so powerful, so confident, so secure in her ability to be what we all needed her to be. I had the impression that she dealt the fate and fortune of the Empire as if it were a deck of cards, and she was a masterful player; I couldn't always talk to her like I could talk to Mom, but there was no one I respected more.

I had been surprised, when I said what I said to her on the Hwaran moon and it actually made her catch her breath. When I said it, I was angry and desperate, fumbling for a cheap shot—I had no idea anything I said could make someone so strong doubt herself.

I thought about her teaching me how to use a wavebreaker, all of those lessons (some successful, some less so) on the bridge. So far as I knew, she'd never done that for anyone else. Surely, if she didn't love me – if she really believed I was a mistake – she wouldn't have done it for me, either.

"I wish you were here right now," I said softly to the statue. "I wish we weren't fighting. I wish you could tell me what I should do, make me feel sure again. When I was little and I asked you a question, I always believed what you said. When you told me to do something, I always knew it would turn out right."

Sighing, I trailed my fingers over the diaphanous folds of Mum's sleeves and gown-tails, every thread faithfully recreated in silver. They were so perfect they could almost have come to life, swirling in the wind that scattered the smog above the factories' smokestacks. As I stroked them, I gazed up into Mum's eyes and imagined what she would say.

_Stop moaning, you whiny twit, _I suddenly heard her voice in my head, clear as she had always seemed to hear Mimi's. _I didn't raise you to laze about complaining to statues. If you can't figure out how to stand on your own two feet, that's reason enough for you to stay where you are until you grow up. _

I blinked at the statue and twisted my little finger in my ear, wondering if I'd really just heard it speak. _Don't let that piece of human filth lay you low, _I was sure I heard Mum snap._ You want purpose? Get up off your pitiful posterior and go find it. _

"There you are!"

Before I could whip around to face her, Effa was laying into me with her riding crop, smacking me across the shoulders until I stumbled down off the statue's base. "Audacious cow!" she barked, the crop catching my arms when I raised them to defend myself. "You think you can just leave the pod whenever you feel like it? You think you have the right to pollute this compound with your presence? Well, I'm _not _sorry to break it to you, but you can't just waltz around this planet like a pig in Irken vestments anymore!

"I don't know how long it'll take you to learn that," she sneered when she caught her breath, lowering the crop to her side, "but I'll be more than happy to beat you until it sticks."

"Okay, okay. I get it, Effa."

She belted me with the crop one more time. "That's _Officer_ Effa," she hissed, and turned on her heel to lead me back to the pod.

In spite of Effa, I left the square feeling better than I had running into it, and almost entirely because of my imaginary conversation with Mum. Not that it didn't still hurt to think about Tren – I didn't think I'd ever be able to look at her again without aching for what we'd had, what might have been – but I was light with renewed determination to make something of my being here.

I wasn't going to beg Effa to let me go home. I wasn't going to give up and trudge through each day like the living dead. Mom talked sometimes about destiny, about how things happened for a reason and we had to take the opportunities we were given.

_There's a reason I'm here, _I told myself as I followed Effa back to the pod. _I just have to go find it. _


	59. Vix's Vision

**58. Vix's Vision**

Once I decided to – once I was no longer distracted by Tren – I started noticing things. I started to think.

As I climbed the ladder to my bed at night, I looked out across the rows of bunk-columns, and saw things I'd never seen when I was daydreaming about Tren. She wasn't the only one who'd managed to smuggle a special artifact through processing.

Lots of the girls had small faded photographs displayed on the poles of their bunk-column, affixed with bits of adhesive swiped from some factory and passed covertly from pod to pod. Pictures of people and pets, obviously snapped by a camera, and pictures that looked torn from newspapers or magazines. Pictures they would touch fondly each night before lights-out, even press their lips to and murmur something I couldn't hear.

Some put other things on the bunk-column's poles. There seemed to be an epidemic of palm-sized trinkets, made with two strips of scrap metal soldered together to form a plus sign (well, sort of a plus sign; one of the four sides, the one they turned towards the bottom, stuck out longer than the other three, so that the shape was almost that of a person), spreading throughout the pod.

Out of a thousand girls, I counted at least fifty with one of the trinkets hanging from the pole by her bed, or shoved under her pillow where she could pull it out and talk to it at night. And they _did _talk to them, no kidding.

They said different things, most of which I couldn't make out, but there was one thing in particular – a kind of poem that didn't rhyme – I heard more than one of them reciting more than once. After so many nights hearing it murmured across so many beds, I committed a few of the words to memory. It began with _our father _(which was confusing; they couldn't all be sisters, could they?) and ended with _amen _(which I could only figure was a nonsense word).

_Deliver us from evil _came in the middle of the poem, but I remembered that, too, because they usually dwelled on it, saying it more than once. There was one girl who always choked up when she got to it, and sometimes started sobbing too hard to finish.

Once I'd heard them saying it, I began to recognize something else, too. There was one girl, 334, who whispered something to herself whenever she was in Effa's presence, or lately, mine; I hadn't paid attention to it before, but I did now, and I realized it was a line from the poem. _Forgive us our trespasses,_ she would say very softly, _as we forgive them that trespass against us._

I noticed other things, too. The girls in the pod, as horrible as they were to me, were possessed of a striking solidarity. For a place where nearly five million officers made their livings off of beating the kindness out of them, they could be surprisingly kind.

I saw girls picking each other up after a lashing, helping fix a beltmate's jammed paint gun, waking a late sleeper before Effa showed up with her shockrod. I saw one girl give half her dinner to a friend who'd missed her quota and had her rations cut, and heard another climbing the ladder at night to comfort a crying bunkmate.

From the corner of my eye, I watched them running a black market that was really more like a charity. It didn't operate on the basis of trading one found or smuggled item for another, but on people obtaining what they could and sharing it with others. Simple things: buttons, handkerchiefs, blades for cutting hair or nails or a path out of this world. Anything someone could swipe from his or her factory without getting caught.

When I decided it was time I started making notes, I went looking for someone who dealt in that kind of thing, in hopes of getting a pencil and paper – which was, I believed, what people had written with before they had tablets and styli – so that I could write things down. One morning at breakfast, I saw three girls slip out the doors on the opposite side of the mess from Effa, and slid off the bench to follow them.

I saw about two seconds of the transaction – one of the girls, 098, passed a needle and a packet of colored thread to another girl, and to the third a couple of elastic hair ties – before their heads shot up in my direction. Two of the girls glared daggers at me, stuffed their items into their jumpsuits, and near knocked me down shoving past me on their way back to the mess.

098 just blinked at me, petrified. "Are you going to turn me in?"

That was the girls in the pod for you. Half of them just plain hated me, and the other half were terrified that I was some kind of mole. "No, no," I tried to assure her. "I just—"

"Please don't tell Effa," she said desperately. "I can make it worth your while. Is there something you want? I could—"

"_Yes_, that's what I came out here for," I cut her off, frustrated. "Do you have something I could use to write? A pencil and paper?"

098 fumbled in her jumpsuit, biting her lip nervously, until she came up with a small, folded bundle of newsprint and a stub of charcoal. She thrust them at me and edged towards the doors of the mess, looking as if she'd narrowly avoided execution.

"Thanks," I said, then paused, pressing my lips together. "I'm not a horrible person, you know."

She blinked at me one more time, and hurried inside.

In any case, I got my writing supplies, and slowly my purpose took shape. I wrote whenever I had a chance. At first, it was just the things I observed – in my bed before lights-out, in the factory if I had a spare second, in the mess when I'd cleaned my tray. I would write down what I saw and heard in as much detail as I could, and think it over constantly.

Then, I began to ask _why._ Why did some of us have to climb ten levels before we slept every night, when surely there was enough space on Earth for barracks without bunk-columns? Why did we have to do so many hours of such mind-numbing work, when surely there were machines that could operate paint guns better than we could? Why were our rations so disgusting, when surely there was a way to make food that was nutritious without being nauseating?

Did anything _have_ to be the way it was? Wouldn't it be worth a little more of an investment to treat people like people, no matter whose people they were?

So I tucked away my notes on how things _were_, and began to write in my spare moments about how things _could_ be. A vision started to form in my head. I was _driven_ again, and I fell in love with an idea instead of a person: the idea, nascent and nebulous though it was, of a better Earth.

Before lights-out, I steadied my paper against my knee and scribbled out a schedule with blocks of free time, and places to spend it. In the factory, when it was half an hour til dinner, I was halfway to my quota, and a beating was inevitable anyway, I asked my notes whether rewards mightn't be more effective than punishments. In the mess, I drew up a plan for turning slavery into a kind of indentured servitude – replacing dead ends with possibilities.

Which landed me plenty of weird looks from the rest of the pod. Once, at lunch, the girl beside me demanded, _what the hell are you doing, anyway? _and reached over to snatch my paper before I could grab it back. Of course, all of my notes were in Irken, so to her they just looked like a bunch of black smudges in rows; she wrinkled her nose and flung it back in my direction, muttering something about _fucking alien gibberish._

I didn't try to explain. Not to that girl, and not to anyone. If they believed I was really doing what I said I was, they wouldn't appreciate it; I knew because I'd known Tren. Had I told her, while we were together, that I was dreaming up how to improve conditions on Earth, she'd have barked a bitter laugh and told me her people didn't need my pity.

She'd have said, _so what? So you ravaged our planet, slaughtered our families, and treated us like animals for five years, and now you're—what? Sorry? _

_You think you can throw a few bones our way and make everything better? You think we _want_ anything from you? My people would rather die resisting you than roll over and heel for better food and more free time. Nothing is going to change what you've already done._

But her voice in my head didn't stop me from trying. Had she said what I thought she'd say, she'd have been right: nothing would change what the Empire had done. I couldn't fix the past, so I focused on brightening the future, and it gave me a reason to wake up every day.

There was no way to chart the time as it passed, but by the time I had a stack of newsprint notes so big I could no longer fit it under my pillow, I thought it must have been several months. By then, I was a different person altogether. I wasn't sobbing at the feet of statues, or pining over Tren. I took Effa's lashings barely flinching, woke to the buzzer every morning, and got within twenty percent of my quota near every day. I was standing on my own two feet, and I knew my destiny.

At every meal, Effa stationed herself on a stool at one end of the mess, flanked by the guard robots that accompanied the pod everywhere. I approached her one morning at breakfast to enact the next phase of my plan.

"Officer Effa," I addressed her, as respectfully as I could without sounding insincere, "may I request a moment of your time?"

She glanced away from the tables she was supervising, the boredom on her face tightening into a frown. "Why? What do you want?"

"I'd be grateful if we could discuss it in private. Would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to step outside with me?"

"Ha!" She gestured with her shockrod at the table I'd come from. "Go away, 850. It's too early for me to deal with your stupidity."

I just stood there and waited, blinking expectantly at her. She ignored me for a minute, then turned back to me, and snapped, "Are you deaf? I told you to leave me be!"

"I really must speak with you, Officer," I said sweetly. "I'm afraid I can't leave just yet."

Glowering, she contemplated her shockrod, probably wondering how many volts it would take to get me to leave her alone. After a few seconds, though, she heaved a groan that sounded like it should've taken all the breath out of her, and got up off of her stool. "Fine. But this had better be quick—and it had better be good."

Outside the mess, Effa folded her arms and began to tap her foot impatiently. "I want to speak with my mum," I said. "In person. I want to apologize for all the trouble I've caused her, renounce my allegiance to humanity, and ask to be reinstated in her court. I was hoping you would be able to help me do that."

"What, so now that you've had a taste of life as a slave, you're ready to run back to Mummy so she can subsidize your uselessness to society?" She snorted. "Fat chance."

"Are you saying you won't help me?"

Effa narrowed her eyes at me. "I'm saying, why should I?"

Which I'd anticipated. "Do you really think my parents are just going to abandon me here forever?" I asked her, pointedly switching to Irken. "That my mum will never wonder if I've learned my lesson, and come back to see if I'm ready to grovel at her feet? That they'll just _forget _about me?"

I raised my eyebrows at her. "If you refuse to help me now, and they come back here in twenty years to find that I've been contrite all this time – that I was _begging_ to come home and make amends, and _you_ wouldn't let me – how do you suppose that's going to reflect on you?"

I took a step closer to her, looking down into her dark green eyes. "If that happens," I said, allowing my voice to drop a note, "I'll personally ensure you get fifty years on planet Stink for every year you let me rot here."

Her frown cut an even deeper groove in her forehead, and she balled her hands into fists. When she huffed out a short, hard, angry breath, I knew she knew I was right.

"_Fine_," she spat, sounding like she'd never been unhappier about anything in her life. "I will put in a request with my supervisor for her to put in a request with the director for him to put in a request with the sector administrator for him to put in your request for an audience with the Tallest." She sniffed as she turned to march back into the mess. "Don't expect to hear back tomorrow."


	60. The Worst and Best Thing

**59. The Worst and Best Thing**

_Tak speaking_

Vix spent nearly a year as a slave on Earth, which I had to concede was longer than I'd expected her to hold out. All the same, I felt a special satisfaction seeing her name – actually, her number – appear on the list of cleared requests for my time, about eleven months after I'd last seen her on the Hwaran moon.

I paged Gaz from my hoverdisc in the hollow interface room, and when she arrived, I showed her the seven digits that represented my triumph, displayed large and bright on the screen. "That's Vix's number, isn't it?" she said from the disc next to mine, where she sat with her legs hanging over its edge. "What do you think it means?"

"It _means_ she's realized how foolish she's been, and she's ready to come back and beg my forgiveness. Finally."

I smiled smugly, and Gaz rolled her eyes. In all this time, we'd never talked much about how I'd chosen to deal with Vix. The whole thing was between Vix and I, she said, since the way she saw it we were both 'making a big deal out of nothing', and she wasn't going to interfere on either of our behalves.

Which I supposed I was obliged to appreciate. It would've been nice to have some support, on one hand. On the other, had she decided to throw her lot in with Vix, she'd probably have shoved me into our bed, pulled out a pair of laser-cuffs, and pleasured me out of near-all my resolutions.

"Of course," I sniffed, "seeing as she _is_, for all intents and purposes, a human slave, I should really be treating her request as I would that of any other human slave."

"You mean laugh at it, delete it, and ream out the sector administrator for letting it get through at all? Or push it so far back on your schedule you won't get to it for fifty years?"

"Mm. They both sound good."

With a sharp kick to her hoverdisc, she jolted up just high to reach out and grab me by my right antenna, not violently but not quite gently, either. She jerked my head down so that I was looking her in the eyes.

"Then let me make it easy for you," she said coolly. "If she wants to come home, let her come home. Bump up her request on the list and get to it in the next few months, or you're sleeping on the couch."

I loosed myself from her grasp and straightened up with as much dignity as I could muster, frowning down at her. "The Almighty Tallest sleeps on no couch."

"She does if she traps my daughter in a living hell for the rest of her natural life." She got to her feet on the hoverdisc, leaned over to me, and kissed me on the cheek. "You'll be glad you did it, Sticky. Trust me."

Thus, however grudgingly, I had Rel add an appointment with Vix to my schedule for the coming month. And the time passed quickly, so that it seemed less a month than a moment. The days and nights blew by like the pages of a book as one flips through it, until I sat enthroned in my lounger on the bridge, waiting for an attendant to show Vix in.

I sat tapping my fingers on the lounger's arm, partly out of impatience, partly to distract myself from the pulsating tightness in my chest. I wouldn't say that I was nervous (for what an unfathomable disgrace it would be, if the ruler of the Irken Empire were _nervous _about addressing a slave), but I was—anxious, to see what the sentence she'd chosen had taught her.

The child stood behind me, one of her hands resting on the back of my lounger. _Well, this should be interesting, _she'd said as she'd strode onto the bridge, and since then, nothing. Like me, she waited silently for the doors to the bridge to slide open, and the worst and best thing we'd ever done together to come walking through them.

When she did, I let out my breath. I'd feared that when I did see her, I would no longer recognize her – that everything that had come between us would have made her somehow physically different, would have changed the fruit of ten years' struggle with parenting into a person I didn't know. That living as a human might have devolved her into one.

But although she was wearing a labor force jumpsuit, with sleeves rolled up to expose a slave's identification number, and although she was perhaps less clean than she'd been when I'd seen her last—in spite of all of it, she was still Vix. The same life I'd brought forth from a few skin flakes and some nutrient solution, the same larva I'd tended for four months in the lab. The same eyes that had always reminded me too much of mine.

I nodded to her escort, and he switched off the laser-cuffs that kept her wrists bound behind her back. She came forward, looking strangely serene, and - before I could so much as think to order it – fell to her knees before me, her hands folded on the bridge platform, her forehead lowered between them. I swallowed my surprise.

"You may speak."

"I've come to ask your forgiveness, my Tallest," she said softly, even reverently, with none of the anger or bitterness I'd expected on this occasion. The harsh words we'd flung on the Hwaran moon were light-years away from her voice. "I made an unwise decision, and I apologize."

She didn't even lift her head when she addressed me. I wasn't sure whether to be unnerved or impressed. "Is that so?"

"Yes, my Tallest. I apologize for abusing the opportunity you were kind enough to bestow upon me. I apologize for insulting you and disobeying your orders. I was presumptuous, shortsighted, and ungrateful, and I apologize for the shame I brought upon you and the Empire."

I nodded slowly. "And what do you ask of me?"

"I ask you to accept my apologies, and restore my rank and privilege as an Irken citizen and a member of your court."

"What of the human girl?"

"I renounce my claim to her, and to the whole of the human race."

Well. It was far from what I'd prepared for, but—wasn't it what I'd wanted? What I'd savored the thought of hearing, back when she'd been calling me a monster and a hypocrite, when I'd felt physically ill looking at her and thinking _this is the child I've raised?_

I'd been so horrified, so enraged, so _disappointed_, and this was everything I'd dreamed of gazing into her gestation tank. Everything I'd hoped a walk in the humans' shoes would teach her. All of the humility, the gratitude, the respect – what more could I ask of her?

"I accept your apologies," I said at last. "You are forgiven. You may return to the Empire with your full rank and privilege restored, and you may live among my court on the Massive. Now," I added when she finally peered up at me, waving my hand in the direction of the doors, "get up, and go clean yourself up and change into something acceptable. Oh, and stop by the lab on your way – they'll reactivate your pak for you, and remove that ghastly tattoo."

Vix rose, smiled, bowed her head briefly to me and to Gaz and trotted off the bridge. I sat there in my lounger a moment after she left, reviewing our exchange in my head, then stood to regard the child. "Well, that was a little too easy," she said, nodding at the place on the platform where Vix had knelt.

"What do you mean? She apologized. She understands that she was in the wrong." I lifted my chin and sniffed. "My plan was successful. Don't be a poor sport."

"Come off it, Tak. You know that was weird."

"I know no such thing. Yes, it's unusual for Vix to behave so humbly, but did it ever occur to you that perhaps she's turned over a new leaf? It seems to me that her time on Earth has taught her to be grateful for what she has, and she'll be a greater asset to the Empire for it."

"I guess we'll see, won't we?"

"Indeed we will."

For awhile, we stood on the platform charting our course on the viewscreen, as I detailed to the bridge crew my plans for the nebula we were approaching. Fifteen minutes after I'd sent her away, Vix returned, groomed and dressed in a manner befitting someone of her restored status, and came to stand between Gaz and I before the screen.

"So let me ask you something, babe," the child said to her after a moment, touching Vix's shoulder. "What made you decide to come back?"

I frowned at her over Vix's head, wishing she would just let it be. "Well," Vix answered, smiling, "it sounds weird, but in a way, it was you. Both of you." I had no idea what _that_ was supposed to mean, but I didn't have long to wonder. She turned to me, still radiating an all but beatific calm, and said, "Mum, I want things to change."

"What?"

"I want things to change. I want to improve the conditions on Earth—maybe on all of the conquered worlds."

The child and I exchanged an uncertain glance. "Why would you want to do that?" I said. "As of today, you are no longer tied to Earth. The conditions there don't concern you."

"But it's not just about _me_, Mum. I want to make things better for everyone. I've been taking lots of notes, these past several months, and I have a plan—"

"Unbelievable." I came away from the screen, sweeping across the platform with the swish of silk and a huff of breath, and turned sharply on Vix. "You lied to me," I snapped, channeling all of my rapidly-renewing frustration into the fiercest possible glare. "You've come back only to trick me into allowing you to exact your treachery on my own ship. You said you had renounced your loyalty to the humans, yet here you stand lobbying for their interests. You disgust me."

"I'm not _loyal_ to the humans!" she protested. "That wasn't even what I said! Why is it treachery to want to use our resources to do something _good_ for a change—to want other people to be happy?"

"Those vile, dirt-eating Earth grubs are not _your people_!"

"Don't you get it? It's not about _my people_ or _your people_. It's just about…people." She bit down on her lower lip, approaching me with the same caution with which one would approach a bloodthirsty beast in its den. I couldn't say that caution was misplaced.

"Listen, Mum, just _listen_ to me for one minute. If things changed, it would benefit the Empire, too. I wouldn't even bring it up if it wouldn't. I did a lot of research while I was waiting for my escort on the sector administrator's satellite, and I _know_ you would see the sense in this if you'd just listen to me."

She didn't wait for me to refuse. "Okay, so tell me if you remember this," she pressed on. "About twenty-eight years ago, a shipment of defective SIR units was accidentally sent to Invader Tenn on planet Meekrob, while the combat mech called the Megadoomer was sent to Zim on Earth. Because their addresses were switched, we not only lost our_ entire_ investment in the Megadoomer, we lost our foothold on Meekrob, and haven't regained it to this day.

"The same thing happened several years later, when Operation Starcrusher failed spectacularly due to an infestation of face-eating fire slugs _and_ to the fact that the Tharlian power core, which was intended to fuel the operation, ended up powering a certain SIR unit instead.

"Do you know what caused both of those supposed _accidents_? Disgruntled slaves working for the shipping system, rebelling against the Empire in the only small way they could. If they'd had even _one_ reason not to utterly despise us, both of those crises might have been completely avoided."

I snorted. "That sounds more like a case to fire the officers letting switched addresses slip than to improve the conditions for the slaves."

"Fine. But what about all of the time, money and energy we spend every year fighting off about a million different branches of the resistance? When the Resisty first surfaced, we thought we were going to crush them in five seconds, and no one would dare challenge us again. Almost thirty years later, Mom's entire _fleet _is devoted to counter-resistance operations, and every time we think we've beaten them they come back somewhere else. How long will it take before they manage to do serious damage?"

"That's ridiculous. The only way the resistance could do any real damage to us is by getting very, very lucky."

"Which isn't impossible. And it would only have to happen once." She was eyeing me meaningfully, building her argument's strength with every word she spoke.

"What if the only way to eliminate the resistance is to eliminate what they're resisting? It wouldn't be that hard. It would require an investment, sure, but less of an investment than you think. If you reinstated me as Director, I could pilot my plan on Earth, and you could see it play out in miniature before committing to it on a larger scale."

I sighed, raising a hand to massage the temple unoccupied by my wavebreaker. If there was one thing Vix had inherited from Gaz, it was her ability to pester me half-into insanity. "And what exactly is this _plan_, Vix?"

"Well, it's sort of graduated. You start with little things. Better-tasting rations, more comfortable beds, shorter work hours and scheduled recreation. Softer quotas, and officers who don't beat you half-dead for missing them. Then you start dividing up the pods into smaller groups, in dormitories instead of barracks. Let them take showers with soap and have belongings they don't have to hide. Let them live with their families and their friends.

"What I'm ultimately getting at," she added, after pausing to take a breath, "is a system more like indentured servitude than slavery – a system that gives you a chance to get out, that gives you a _reason_ to give your all. Maybe even the possibility of doing some things you couldn't have done before we came into the picture. Things would be _so_ much better on Earth, Mum, if only people had that little bit of hope."

Completely bypassing the question of why I should care a whit whether a slave race had _hope_, I folded my arms across my chest, and posed the question, "And what do you suppose a member of a slave race would do, Vix, given freedom after so many years of oppression? Thank us profusely and shower us with flowers?"

Gaz put a hand to her mouth to suppress a snort of laughter. "I know it wouldn't be all rainbows and sunshine," Vix said, undeterred. "We'd probably see a spike in the resistance before we saw it weaken. But it would pay off in the end, I promise you it would. We could deal with whoever bit the hand that feeds them – and they _would_ be biting the hand that feeds them, that's something right there – and in a hundred years, no one would remember there was ever reason to rebel against us.

"Let them start families, have babies, bring a couple of new generations into a world where Irkens are the administrators of a fair system instead of the wardens of a planetwide prison. We'll have a constantly-renewing source of willing labor, so we won't _need_ to work anyone their whole life through."

"So…what?" I mused sarcastically. "I save a few hundred monies on shockrods and riding crops, and spend several billion making our labor force more comfortable? Where are we getting the resources for this little revolution, do you suppose?"

Vix lifted her eyebrows. "We could start with the resources you're using to conquer solar systems to give as birthday presents."

Gaz looked at me as if to say _she's got you there_, and briefly, I envied her indifference – wished I had the luxury to stand by and watch this play out, instead of being the one forced to choose between my daughter's revolutionary idealism and millennia of Irken tradition.

"Do you plan to do this all by yourself?" I asked stubbornly, stalling, searching for holes to poke in her plan. I had to give her credit: she seemed to have thought this out well, and the number of shots I could take was dwindling. "I don't expect there'll be many Irkens jumping at the chance to help you."

"I know at least one person who might." She glanced over her shoulder at Gaz. "I was thinking I'd ask Dib if he wants to be—I don't know, my lieutenant or something. He likes that kind of thing, right?"

"You mean the helping-people-who-tormented-him-his-entire-life thing? Yeah, he loves that shit. The question, of course," she added, smirking, "is why you'd want to let him do anything he _likes_."

Vix looked again to me, the color in her cheeks deepened by the thrill of hope. "_Please_, Mum? The last thing I want in the universe is for us to be on bad terms again, but I really believe in this, and I _will_ fight for it if I have to. Just give me a chance. I swear you won't regret it."

I had no way of knowing that. If I gave her the _yes _she was after, it could be the downfall of the Empire, or it could be the dawn of a glorious new age – a sixteen-year-old's promise and my own confused instincts weren't enough to tell me. I knew that if I did say no, I couldn't give her any real reason.

I could say _I am the Almighty Tallest, and I owe you nothing; my job is to make the decisions, not explain them_. But contrary to what I'm sure some people believed, I didn't enjoy doing that. I wasn't much more than twenty years into this job, and I still had to remind myself where and what I was as I opened my eyes each morning; it wasn't in my nature to pull rank on anyone.

"Vix…" I released a long breath. "I will consider it."

Her face lit up and she squealed, dashing over to throw her arms around me and hug me like she used to hug my legs when she was tiny. "Thank you _so _much," she enthused, as if I'd already said yes, as I blinked down at her and tried to figure out how to peel her off of me without seeming entirely horrid. "I'm so glad we can be friends again."

"Yes, well." I cleared my throat, backing gingerly out of her embrace. "I said I would _consider_ it."

"Oh yeah, we'll both consider it," the child put in as she sauntered over to us, grinning. "We'll consider it all night long." She slung her arm around my shoulders and winked at Vix, mouthing something in the vicinity of _don't worry about it. _I tried not to swallow audibly.

Later that night, before she undid me completely, Gaz laid behind me in our bed stroking my antennae. She'd been at it for awhile and I was a little dreamy, but I still had the presence of mind to gripe about Vix. "I can't believe I let that little urchin get the better of me," I muttered.

"Mm. You made the right choice, Sticky."

"Officially, I haven't made any choice yet."

"Yeah, but I have." She took me by the shoulder and pulled me over onto my back, sliding on top of me. I could feel the grin on her lips when she lowered her head and kissed my neck. "Don't tempt me."

I let her do as she would for a minute, closing my eyes and shivering as her lips and teeth left a trail of hot wet marks on my skin. "I don't know," I sighed, half-wishing she'd leave me alone so I could mull this over and half-wishing she'd hurry up and make me forget it. "I suppose it's just that this—isn't what I pictured, when we decided to keep her. It isn't what I'd hoped for."

"You know that's not true." She lifted her head to fix me with a knowing gaze. "You think you'd be happier if Vix was a perfect little wind-up soldier, marching off in whichever direction you sent her? That's bullshit. If you wanted a robot for a kid, you'd have built one.

"You may not like her better for having the guts to stand up to you, but you _do_ respect her, and you'll be prouder of her for forging her own path than you were watching her kneel at your feet. Demand obedience from your subjects, Sticky; expect strength from Vix.

"Oh, and expect _me_ to fuck you until you can't see straight. But I guess you already did, didn't you?"


	61. The Weird Thing That Happened

I'M SORRY

I HAD TO

*throws grenade and runs*

**60. The Weird Thing That Happened**

_Dib speaking_

I had several reasons for accepting Vix's offer to help her change things on Earth. It was partly because she was probably the only person who was consistently nice to me when I came by the Massive, more than my sister and my own daughter; partly, too, because I thought it might stop me feeling so mentally constipated over having done jack shit to stop Tak from taking over the Earth. Partly because I had nothing else better to do.

But mostly because of The Weird Thing That Happened before I left for Earth.

_"Where _are_ we?"_

_"More to the point," Zim grumbled as he climbed out of his cockpit, "why have you followed me here?" _

_GIR sprang out of Zim's cruiser and its windshield slid shut, leaving it to squat on the cliff next to mine. We looked out at an undulating expanse of nuclear-yellow grassland, veined with rivers of something that definitely wasn't water; above us, the sky was a dome of highlighter pink. As we approached the edge of the overhang, a small fleet of balloons burst on long strings from GIR's head, and he floated away laughing madly._

_"Come on. You know you'd be bored without me around." I eyed the rapidly-receding cluster of balloons. "Like GIR is such great company."_

_"For your information, Dib-worm, GIR is actually a very capable conversationalist."_

_I just looked at him for a moment, eyebrows raised, waiting to see if he actually expected me to swallow that. Then, I let out a snort of laughter, and he actually snickered for about half a second before frowning up at me and popping off a few shots from his pak-mounted laser – as if it would cause a rift in the space-time continuum for us to share the same sentiment without some kind of violence being involved. I ducked, wincing at the smell of singed hair._

_"Hey!" I protested as I straightened up, feeling for a bald spot. "You almost sliced off my—uh—my—" I rolled my eyes in a futile attempt to look up at the zigzagging spike in my hair. "This thing."_

_"Ha! You don't know what it is either, do you?" A silver limb pushed out of its port, rooted around in his pak, and deposited an environment-reader in his hand. He depressed a switch with his thumb and swiped it through the air in front of us. "I always figured it was some kind of antenna, and you were receiving transmissions from planet Stupid…Dirty…Screaming-Idiot-Boy."_

_Now that I was around so much, he was running out of new ways to insult me (not that his insults had exactly been ingenious before), which was funny because he absolutely still tried. He just tended to repeat the old ones over and over again, to the point that they were practically terms of endearment by now. _

_"So what's it say?" I asked, nodding at the reader. "Are we going to melt breathing the air here or what?"_

_"Well, hopefully _you_ will. I and my superior Irken physiology will stand here and laugh at you as you liquefy into a steaming, stinking puddle of…human…cheese." He blinked down at the scanner, shrugged, and tossed it aside. "Nah, it's fine."_

_"So tell me something else," I said as we checked out the cliff, peering into a series of little groves of silver trees dripping with clam-shaped flowers. "Is there actually a _reason _you left Rax for this place? Or are we just here so you won't have to admit that you don't have any plan whatsoever for overthrowing Tak, and you don't know what else to do with your life?"_

_Zim sniffed indignantly. "You have no idea what you're blabbering about, as usual. I do, in fact, have an exceedingly subtle and sophisticated plan for exterminating the glorified termite who goes by the filthy name of Tak; it's just that your pudding-cup brain can't possibly comprehend it."_

_"Wow. It must be _really_ subtle, huh?"_

_"Indeed. I'm glad you understand."_

Returning to Earth was…weird, to put it mildly. If I didn't know where I was going, I might not have recognized it at all. Smog from the Irken factories cloaked the planet in grey, and inside the shell it wasn't much better. I touched down near the administrative complex and stepped out onto hard-packed dirt, the same sanguinary red as the sky. Short, fat buildings clustered around me, and the factories' smokestacks rose into the sky like the barrels of hunting rifles; where there were no structures, there was only flat red desert, stretching out into the horizon.

Only six years ago – and for thirty-three years before – this had been my home, but it felt now like less of a home than my cramped cruiser, or the planets I'd camped on with Zim. I guessed that was what I'd always feared.

"You're here!" Before I could wonder where I was supposed to go, Vix was bounding across the courtyard in front of the complex, looking happier to see me than I thought anyone had ever been. "How are you? Was the trip okay? Are you excited? I'm _so _excited. Come on, come inside and let's get going already!"

That was the thing about Vix – looking at her, she reminded me a lot of Tak, and sometimes of my sister when she screwed her face up a certain way, but she was much more positive person than either of them had ever been.

At best, her relentless friendliness was unbelievable (how two people as cynical as Tak and Gaz had produced someone so cheerful she probably shat rainbows, I'd never know), at worst annoying, but either way I had to give her credit for her readiness to babble blithely at me while J4 avoided me at all costs. My visits to the Massive, awkward as they were, would've been much more so if it weren't for her.

Inside the administrative complex, in what I guessed was some kind of conference room, two people stood waiting for us. One was a slightly-less-shrimpy variety of Irken, with long curling antennae, dark green eyes, and a look on her face as unpleasant as Vix was upbeat. The other was a teenage girl with shoulder-length brown hair, a makeshift metal cross hanging from a cord around her neck. The number on her right arm read 2708-334.

"Okay, introductions!" Vix smiled broadly at all of us. "This," she said, indicating the frowning Irken, "is Effa, my officer liaison and advisor, and she's here because she doesn't want to be here. The other one is Joy, my human liaison and _other _advisor, and she's here because she likes to forgive people. Effa, Joy, this is my uncle, Dib, and he's going to help us out."

Effa looked me up and down, unamused. "Are you also here against your will?"

_No, _I thought wryly to myself, scratching the back of my head, _I'm here because of The Weird Thing That Happened. _"No, no," Vix answered for me instead. "He's here because he likes saving the Earth. Right?"

She turned expectantly to me, and I shook off my thoughts. "Right," I said. "Yeah. I mean—_trying_ to save the Earth, anyway."

We all sat down around a table and Vix did a lot of explaining – to me, how things were on Earth, and to everyone how she wanted them to be. I watched the high points of her speech scroll by on the screen set into my place at the table, trying to resist the temptation to let my mind wander.

The last night I remembered – the last night before I'd taken off for Earth, and day and night had become, for awhile, nonexistent – kept cropping up in my mind at the weirdest times, and I kept having to squash it. I felt like I was playing frickin' Whac-a-Mole.

"All right, so first things first," Vix was saying as I blinked away another daydream. "We're going to have a few planning sessions. What we want to focus on right now is improving the schedule – making the work hours more tolerable and fitting in free time."

Effa raised her hand like we were in school and Vix was the teacher. "I have a question," she said snidely. "What are you going to do when your _improved schedule_ tanks our production numbers? Have you even thought that far?"

"Actually, I have. Mum's already approved the additional funding to install assembly-line machinery that will pick up the slack in half the time any labor force could do it. And if that doesn't work," she added sweetly, "I'll just blame you."

When Joy spoke up, she did so more softly, in a voice like a breeze through tall grass. "When do you anticipate the new schedule will be implemented, Director Vix?"

"Well, as soon as possible, of course. After we firm up a schedule, we'll do some field work – we'll need recreational spaces and more barracks, so we'll have to get some measurements down and some blueprints drawn up – and we'll be ready to start shifting everyone to the new schedule as soon as building's finished. Piece of cake."

It was good, I thought, to have something to do again. A goal to work towards, even if it was optimistic. It's true, what they say about idle hands.

_"You've been to see that monster," Zim accused me, when my cruiser's windshield opened in the clearing where we'd pitched camp. We were on a forest planet, called something like Naffle or Wegg – some kind of breakfast food. _

_I smirked. "Are you jealous?"_

_"Zim is jealous of no one, Earth stink. It's just that you should disinfect yourself after you've been around that creature – I don't want its germs giving me mongrel plague."_

_In the middle of the clearing, GIR sat wearing a chef's toque and flipping burgers on a grill (I had no idea where he'd gotten it, but by then I knew better than to ask). When I passed, he tossed one onto a bun and handed it to me, and I settled on a low branch to eat it (also knowing better than to wonder what it was made of)._

_"She's not so bad, really," I said. "She's learned to talk – not that she talks much to me – and she walks upright and wears clothes and everything. They've even fixed her up so she looks normal."_

_"Normal! You might amuse me, Dib-monkey, if you weren't so obviously mentally ill. If you think a thing like that is _normal_…" _

_Zim just shook his head disgustedly, his whole face twisted up like he wanted to spit out something sour. He'd been in the cockpit of his cruiser when I showed up, making unnecessary repairs to some unnecessary apparatus (not that he'd ever have admitted as much; had I asked, he'd have come up with some ridiculous reason why what looked like an Irken pogo stick was going to be instrumental to his defeating Tak), and he returned to it now. I watched, unspeaking, for a short time._

_"She looks like you, you know," I said, grinning. "She's got your eyes. Not just the color, either. When I say something that rubs her the wrong way – which is just about everything I say – she always gives me this one look, with one of her eyes widened and the other narrowed. It reminds me of you."_

_"Oh, does it?" Glowering, he chucked the pogo stick across the clearing at my head, knocking me off the branch and my half-eaten burger out of my hands. I picked myself up sucking my breath through clenched teeth, rubbing the bruise I could feel forming on my forehead. "That'll remind you of me, too."_

_Effectively chastened, I plunked myself down in the grass and tried to ignore the throbbing in my forehead, the heat of the blood collecting under my skin. To distract myself, I watched GIR carefully browning his burgers, whistling to himself like a potbellied suburban dad grilling in his backyard. I was half-surprised he hadn't drawn on a mustache to complete the illusion._

_"If you love that thing so much," Zim said eventually, once he'd calmed down and found some other pointless thing to work on, "why don't you get out of my antennae already, and go waste _all_ of your time vomiting affection at it on the Massive?"_

_I sighed. "J4 doesn't like me. I think the only reason she even tolerates me is because she knows I'm not going to stay."_

_"Ha! At least that monster has some sense. That being the only thing it might have gleaned from the incredible genes of ZIM!" He hopped out of the cockpit and marched across the clearing, toward a path furrowed amid the trees. "I'm going to find some looleelagoog to melt down for cruiser fuel. Flip you on the bright side, Dib-meat."_

_I shook my head slowly. GIR looked up from his grill and smiled at me. "Master's happy you're back."_

Our first stage of "field work", as Vix called it, consisted of traveling the planet via capsule rail and taking measurements for additional barracks, which she wanted built smaller, with one- or at most two-level beds. We also had to plan out the recreational facilities: buildings with space for couches, televisions, games, pools full of sterilized water-substitute and inner tubes with googly Irken eyes and inflatable antennae – anything that might distract an embittered, exhausted slave from the memory of the past six years.

Vix meant well, I knew. What's more, given the average intelligence of humanity as I'd observed it, she would probably succeed.

Vix could've commissioned a team of Irken architects to do all of it for us, but she wanted to oversee it personally, so off we went on the capsule rail. Not that she was pressing the button on the laser-gauge herself. Into the capsule with Vix, Effa, Joy and I crowded Vix's train of attendants, who scurried about the undeveloped land roping off big blocks at her thumbs-up.

All the while, Effa would be nitpicking, criticizing the location she'd chosen, or the angle of the proposed structure, or the suitability of the land. I guess she'd figured if she couldn't wriggle out of the project, she could run it better than Vix could.

They had an antagonistic chemistry, Vix and Effa, sort of like Zim and I. More than once, noting the obvious pleasure Vix took in arguing with the opinionated officer, I wondered if I should warn her about where she was heading.

"You can't put it there," Effa was snapping, half at the frazzled attendants, half at Vix. We were outside a block of barracks, staking the boundaries of a recreational structure– the tenth or ten-thousandth that day, I'd lost count – and, of course, they had to fight about it first. "I _told _you not to put it there. It ought to be at _least_ another hundred feet to the right."

"And what's wrong with where it is now?" Vix demanded.

"It's completely remote. I know you can't possibly understand this, since you're a lazy spoiled twit who won't actually have to _deal_ with any of these ridiculous changes, but anyone leading a pod over here would have to take a pointlessly circuitous route. If you would just move it a few hundred feet—"

"What difference is a few hundred feet going to make?"

"Well, you won't know if you don't _listen_ to me, will you?"

"Why would I listen to you? _You're_ just a jerk and a poor sport, and you're not even earning the wages you're getting paid for this; all you ever do is gripe at me!"

"As if you would know about _earning_ anything!"

While Vix and Effa traded barbs as if they were Pokémon cards, the attendants dashed back and forth with their laser-gauge and armfuls of stakes, uprooting and re-planting them with every turn in the tide of the squabble. Finally, they gave up, and plopped down panting on the ground to await definitive orders.

Joy and I, having learned about six spats ago to stay well out of them, sat on opposite benches in the capsule and watched. "This is going well," I said dryly, glancing at Joy.

She responded with a small smile, saying nothing. Effa was transparent enough, but I'd been on Earth for a month now and I still couldn't figure Joy out. It would have made sense, I thought, if she'd been resentful of the rest of us; I'd have understood if she'd hated me, the traitor who ran away when it mattered most and only came back now that things were getting better.

Somehow, though, her silence – which was all any of us got from her, most of the time – didn't seem like the silent treatment. It was more like she was saving up her words, for a time when she might really need them.

"So what do you really think of all this?" I tried again. "I know Vix said you like to forgive people, but you must be pretty damn forgiving if you're not secretly cursing us all right now."

Joy actually laughed. "Forgiveness doesn't have that much to do with it," she said, with a real smile this time. "I feel I can do more good by answering the call to help my people – wherever it comes from – than by holding a grudge on their behalf. That's not so hard to believe, is it?"

"I guess not. Still seems awfully noble of you, though."

"Thanks, I guess." Tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, she tilted her head and pursed her lips, looking at me as if I were a bacterium under a microscope. "Are you ashamed?" she asked, after a moment of silence.

"_Ashamed_?" Okay, awkward question. But I figured she had a right to ask. "Yeah, a little bit," I admitted. "There wasn't much I could've done, in retrospect, but I still feel guilty for bailing when the chips were down."

"No, not that," she said, shaking her head. "It's just—I don't know. There's something about you – I can't put a finger on it, but you seem like you're running away from something. Hiding."

I couldn't help it; I flushed. How could she tell? Sure, I was always obsessing over The Weird Thing That Happened – for fuck's sake, how could I not? – but I didn't know it _showed._

"Um—I—" Flustered, my cheeks scalding, I glanced out at the stretch of dirt where the attendants were regrouping, roping off a rectangle halfway between Vix's and Effa's preferred locations. "I think I should go help Vix," I said, and scrambled out of the capsule.

_Six years after we'd met again on Rax, Zim and I found ourselves tromping through the underbrush of the planet Qfpcb, an unpronounceable world lush with unimaginable wonders. "Wonders" being a catch-all term for the innumerable shades of weirdness one encountered traveling the universe, some of which were actually less wonderful than you'd hope._

_On Qfpcb, one of those wonders was a knee-high flower with a large white bud, which every so often opened of its own accord to belch a jet of fire into the air. The forest we were camping near was lousy with them, and one night, I made up my mind to make use of one. _

_My eyebrows didn't survive unsinged, but I did manage to slice one flower's thick stalk with a pak-mounted laser, so as to bring it back to the edge of the forest where we'd made camp. Kicking a small heap of dry grass and broken branches away from the treeline, I grasped the flower right beneath its bud, and pushed my other hand up the stalk like I was squeezing the dregs out of a tube of toothpaste. _

_The petals burst open, and alakazam, I had myself a crackling campfire. I might have thought I was camping on Earth, if it weren't for…you know, everything else._

_Even spent, the bud was curiously thick; after picking at the petals awhile, I realized that they could be peeled back, revealing a layer of moist white meat. I scooped it out, chopped it up, and pushed it in little chunks onto a long, sharp stick, thinking I'd find out how it would taste roasted. _

_As I sat holding the stick over the fire, turning it occasionally and watching the meat brown, I half-watched Zim tightening the screws in a panel that usually lived in the wall of his cruiser. With every crank of the wrench, the screws would squeak, _vreet vreet, _in accompaniment to Zim's favorite idle pastime: complaining about Tak. _

_"Filthy slimy scheming pig!" _Vreet vreet. _"I'll call her my Tallest when I call my cruiser Bob." _Vreet vreet. _"Biscuit-eating, butt-picking, bilge-sucking b…banana tree! Dethroning the _real_ Tallest, hijacking the Massive, stealing my job. What's with her always wanting my job? I told her the first time, the Earth was _mine_ to ravage. I called it!" _Vreet vreet. _"Fouling up the universe with her revolting half-breed offspring." _Vreet vreet. _"Playing house with that smug stinkpail of a human girl!"_

_"Amen to that," I contributed, nodding. "When they showed up at my house acting all Ricky-and-Lucy, I couldn't even believe it until they'd been gone about a day. I didn't think you people _did_ that kind of thing."_

_"We _don't_." Zim glanced up from the panel in his lap long enough to shoot me a glare. "Tak has lowered herself beyond redemption," he grumbled, the semi-melodic _vreet vreet_ resuming as he returned to his work, "but I suppose your festering lump of a sister should be glad of it. Not every human can say she's satisfied her disgusting urges with someone as…relatively…_impressive_ as Tak." _

_He sort of _humph_ed under his breath, then cackled mockingly. "You certainly can't, can you?"_

_"No, I can't."_

_"You never even had a – what do humans call it? – _girlfriend_." Again, he snickered. "So tell me, Dib-beast, are you just a complete failure as a human being? I thought the minimum requirement for filthy-human status was a breathing receptacle in which to deposit your genetic material."_

_"Who are you, my sister?" I frowned. "I never had a _girlfriend _because I was always too busy trying to stop _you_ from taking over the Earth."_

_"Well, you see how that turned out for you."_

_"I do now, yeah. But if you're going to make fun of me, you should at least know that I'm the loser I am because of you." I shrugged, feeling oddly unburdened by regrets. There were times when I looked back at the past and felt so bitter it literally hurt, but this wasn't one of them. "I was married to my job, I guess. My job being you."_

_"Married! Humans and their appalling turns of phrase." He snorted. "I suppose I should count myself fortunate not to have ended up on the wrong end of your unfulfilled obligations."_

_Having roasted the flower's meat to my satisfaction, I pulled the stick out of the fire and slid a warm golden cube off one end of it. It reminded me of a mussel or an oyster – a salty, slippery lump, better swallowed than chewed. "Unfulfilled obligations?"_

_"You know what I mean, dense as you are. Do not pretend to misunderstand the words of Zim."_

_"Oh, _that?_ Please." I swallowed another chunk of meat, smirking. "The only reason I'd ever want to do _that_ would be to hear you scream for mercy."_

_He narrowed his eyes at me. The _vreet vreet_ gave way to a _clink_ as he set down the wrench. "Are you challenging me, Dib-monster?"_

_"I'm doing whatever you think I'm doing, Zim."_

_I don't know why I said the things I said that day – the things I said that led to the things we did. Maybe I wasn't thinking. Maybe I was thinking clearly for the first time. Maybe I was just sick of everything, fucking _everything_, and I didn't care anymore. _

_Or maybe I'm such a fucking dysfunctional idiot that I mashed everything, every person I never met, every relationship I never pursued, every opportunity I missed hunched over my computer or crouched outside Zim's window or wedged into the cockpit of Tak's ship into this shrimpy smirking dipshit who was my whole life since I was ten, and pinned it all on him, and wanted him to be everything to me. Maybe it could never have been any other way, because no one else could ever have understood me – the person he made me – like him._

_In any case, he was at least as stupid as I was (which had always been, once I thought about it, how our relationship worked), because he came over and looked me dead in the face. I set down my half-eaten skewer in the dirt. Zim's eyes held mine for a moment, then flicked up to my forehead, to the spot where he'd beaned me with the pogo stick._

_That had been more than a year ago, but I still had a small white scar. He brushed the tips of his fingers along it, smiling smugly to himself. _

_He glanced back down then, into my eyes. He removed my glasses, about as gently as I thought it was possible for him to do anything, then promptly invalidated that gentleness by cracking them in half across the bridge and tossing them over his shoulder. "Hey, what the hell?" I protested. "You can't just—"_

_"Shut your stupid mouth."_

_He grabbed my face and kissed me._

_Which was how The Weird Thing That Happened…happened. And it _was_ weird. Weird and gross and embarrassing, and incredibly awkward, and also not the most unpleasant thing I'd ever done in my life. That was the worst part, I think, that it _wasn't_ awful; if it had been, it would have been easier to forget. _

_But it was like all our petty games over the years: sneering, glaring, striking and retaliating, with so much and yet so little at stake, and trying to win without admitting that the best part was in the playing. The ecstatic, horrific _togetherness_ of it, both of us being everything to each other for a series of seconds in time. When it was over, I felt like I'd always felt after our battles – a little relieved, a little disappointed, and most of all secure in the knowledge that it wasn't the end of the war. _

_Of course, when I woke up the next morning, things looked different. Not that how I felt about The Weird Thing had changed. I just panicked at the thought of actually having to _deal_ with it, having to face Zim, and he must have felt the same way because he was gone. _

_Not _gone _gone – his cruiser and all his stuff was still there, and GIR, having showed up at some point during the night, was snoozing under a blanket sucking his thumb – but it was enough. As the sky lightened above me, I ground out the last embers of the fire, fixed my glasses with a bonding-laser, and started up my cruiser's computer to check for missed transmissions._

_Vix's offer gave me the only excuse I needed to turn tail and run, like a binge-drinker who wakes up in an unfamiliar bed. More accurately, like a stupid-dirty-screaming-idiot-boy who fucks his worst enemy and his best friend because he's too dumb to know not to, and doesn't have the balls to stick around and find out what happens now._


	62. The Complete Disintegration

OH COME ON, YOU CAN'T WRITE ZIM FANFICTION WITHOUT ZADR

WELL OKAY YOU CAN

...

BUT I CAN'T.

Oh, and just as a heads-up, the arc that's beginning here is going to be the last one. Goin' out with a bang!

**61. The Complete Disintegration of Abso-fucking-lutely Everything**

_Gaz speaking_

So once upon a time, my dumbshit brother lost his rapidly-expiring virginity (seriously, if Dib were a carton of milk, he'd have been way past chunky by the time somebody finally popped that top) to an alien, and ruined everything for everyone. No, literally. _Everyone._

It was about a year after Tak reappointed Vix as Director on Earth, and we were chilling on the bridge like always. Tak was sitting in her lounger issuing orders to the bridge crew; I was lolling in a scoop chair, sucking on the straw of a soda. Ordinary as fuck.

By which I mean there were no omens, no signs to warn us of the brewing storm. The stars scattered across the viewscreen weren't spontaneously imploding, and the soda in my cup didn't turn to blood. You would think _something_ would have happened – that the universe itself ought to have rebelled against the cataclysm that was about to occur – but it didn't. We never saw it coming.

So when the doors to the bridge slid open, and Zim came strutting in looking like a fucking telephone pole, it was like a slap in the face. To me, anyway, and I was only a bystander to the whole thing. My cup slipped out of my hand onto the platform, as I choked on the gulp of soda halfway down my throat, but _I _wasn't the one he was there to depose, and what's more, I'd known he was alive.

For Tak, it was probably more like a knife in the gut. In the silence that swept the bridge – in which the crew gawked, Zim smirked, and the train of attendants behind him cowered in awe and fear – her breath failed her. The color left her face; her eyes grew huge with horror.

He sauntered right up to her lounger, leaned down to look her in the eyes (sweet cyborg Christ—if there was one thing in the universe I thought I'd never see, it was Zim leaning _down _to speak to Tak), and said, "I think you're in my seat."

Tak just stared at him, speechless, motionless. The entire bridge seemed frozen in time. Being perhaps the most composed of the bunch, I got up out of my chair, took a few steps across the platform, and looked Zim up and down, swallowing nausea at the thought of what had to have happened to make him this way.

Of course, there was no wondering _who._ I knew where my brother had been during the six years between the assimilation of Earth and the commencement of Vix's reforms, and I knew he'd been blissfully ignorant with her for a seventh. What's more, I knew – say it with me now – that where there was trouble, there was Dib.

"Well, well," I said, striving for a lightness of tone that would mask the first stirrings of dread in my stomach. "You look like you've been getting friendly with my brother."

He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about, which of course he wouldn't. "Shut your filthy mouth, presumptuous human hood ornament!" he snapped. "My business is not with you."

"You should be dead," Tak said, finally finding her voice. Or not so much her voice as a shadow of it, a strengthless whisper; her fingers dug into the arms of her lounger, silently denying his claim to it. "You should be dead."

"Ha! You thought you could do away with ZIM, lord of destruction, scourge of the universe, supreme bringer of pants-soiling DOOM? You're even dumber than I thought you were."

He backed away from the lounger to stand in the center of the platform, looking immensely pleased with himself (for having done abso-fucking-lutely nothing, I might add, except let my idiot brother get in his pants). "As you can see, Tak, not only am I not dead, I am in fact _less _dead than I have ever been in my life, and I have returned to the Empire to free my people from your tyranny."

"From _my_—!" Tak choked midsentence and she tried again, sounding panicked, strained. "This can't be happening," she muttered, clutching her temples. "This—_cannot_—happen."

"I assure you, it can," Zim answered with a sort of leisurely malice, inspecting the tips of his gloved fingers like a human would inspect his nails. "And it is. I knew my plans to rid the Empire of you would bear fruit in time, and now you all see what fools you were to underestimate Zim."

"Oh, _please_," I spoke up, rolling my eyes. "Do you really expect us to believe that bullshit? You didn't _plan_ this any more than I planned about a hundred drunk hookups with random chicks at basement raves."

He frowned at me. "What are you yammering about, Earth pig? My strategic capabilities are far beyond your comprehension."

"So you know how this happened, then," I said, gesturing to the excess of space I was already sick of him occupying. God knows the last thing the universe needed was even an inch more of Zim.

He sniffed indignantly. "Of course I do."

"All right. How?"

"Why should _you_ be concerned with the reasons some of us are superior to others?" he retorted, frustrated. "I will waste no more of my breath speaking to you. You!" He whirled on the cluster of crew members who had shown him in, and they collectively flinched. For the first time, I noticed that Rel was among them, looking more miserable than I'd ever seen her. "Remove this revolting creature from my sight!" he ordered them—and fuck me, they did.

They didn't look happy about it, but they did. A handful of them, led by Rel, broke off from the group and approached me, surrounding me, taking my wrists. And what could I do? Fight them off? All I had was my pak; there was nothing I could have done that they couldn't have turned back on me tenfold.

I was nothing if not a fighter, but I was also smart enough to know when I was outmatched. So I let myself be escorted off the platform, to the outer ring of the bridge by the doors – and it was there, as I watched the disaster of that day unfold, that I really realized what we were dealing with.

Rel blinked up at me once, a terrible sadness in her eyes, and whispered _I'm sorry. _But she didn't tell the attendants to let me go. The bridge crew was staring at Zim with dismay deepening into terror, but when he spoke of _freeing the Empire,_ they didn't protest_. _They all knew what he'd done, what he _was_ – an idiot, a menace, the laughingstock of the Empire and the greatest danger it had ever faced – but they saw him towering above them and they obeyed him anyway.

Why, I didn't know. I had never figured out whether the Irkens venerated their Tallest because of something in their biology, some switch in their brains duct-taped in the 'on' position, or because they'd been conditioned to. Then again, it had never mattered. They were loyal to Tak. That was enough.

Now, we found ourselves facing the other edge of the sword. Now, I suddenly understood how much that inexplicable loyalty had meant. We'd taken it for granted, all of this time, and it had seemed so strong – strong enough to withstand the death of the entire control brain network, and a revolution the likes of which Irken society hadn't seen in millennia. A human fleet commander. A hybrid princess. All of Tak's uncertainties and eccentricities, her moodiness, her vendettas. Anything, except the inch that separated her from Zim.

If—when—they turned on her, what could she do? Not a goddamn thing. She wasn't a god, even though they'd worshipped her like one. She couldn't fling lightning bolts from the clouds, or summon a flood to drown the wicked and the idolatrous. Without her subjects, Tak was nothing; whatever power she had began and ended with them.

I knew then exactly how things would play out, and I knew it was going to get ugly. More than anything, I wanted to grab Tak and get out, just _go_, if only to spare her that humiliation. But all I could do was stand by and watch.

"You see, Tak?" Zim said smugly, as the attendants and the crew avoided her eyes. "The Irken people know who is the rightful ruler of their Empire. Now—are you going to step down gracefully, or be as sore a loser as you were the first time I crushed you like the insect you are?"

It killed me to see Tak looking how she looked then – like an animal in a trap. "You're insane," she said with the fierceness of desperation. "You're insane—if you think—I'm turning _my_ Empire over to _you_!"

"Fine. If you refuse to abdicate, you will be dethroned."

Zim strode up to Tak, grabbed her by the arm, and jerked her out of her lounger, as easily as if she were made of crepe paper. He shoved her and she stumbled backwards, tripping over her gown, hitting the platform with a _thud_ and the clatter of boot-heels.

And there she stayed, a heap of skinny limbs and purple silk, trembling almost imperceptibly, as he seated himself in her lounger. There she stayed, while the attendants held me back from helping her, and no one else even tried.

"You know, you look good down there, Tak," Zim said with a cruel smile, looking down on her from her own lounger. "Better than I've ever seen you. Perhaps I'll have you skinned, and made into a rug."

That tore it. She shot up and lashed out at him, as a sound not quite a roar, a shout, nor a sob exploded from her throat. Before she could get her spider-legs into him, a wave of little green nubs spilled over her and pulled her back, and the bridge descended into chaos. Tak was fighting off a swarm of crew monkeys on the platform, Zim was cackling maniacally from the lounger, and I was standing there with just Rel clutching my wrist, waiting to wake up from this huge fucking nightmare.

When that didn't happen, I decided I had to act. Yanking my arm out of Rel's grip, I climbed back up onto the platform and fired a shot through the crowd with my pak-mounted laser, sending the crew scrambling to the edges of the platform.

"Tak, let's get the fuck out of here!" I barked before they could converge again. I took her hand, and together we fled the bridge; Rel didn't try to stop us at the doors.

I didn't think Zim would give up so easily, though – not now that Tak's head on a platter was just a command away – so to keep from ending up his prisoners or worse, we'd have to get off the Massive and far away from the Armada as fast as we possibly could. As we ran down hallways and across decks, mostly emptied of Irkens gone to the bridge to see what was happening, I paged Mimi via the transmitter in my pak, hoping she could get down to the docking bay before we did and warm up Tak's old ship.

Halfway there, I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Tak's gown was slowing her down, its tails and sleeves mashed and tangled by the crew's boots and continually catching on hers. I skidded to a stop, breathing hard, and whipped my pak's laser out again – this time, to slice the gown off just below her knees, sending a mound of purple silk billowing to the floor at her feet.

I didn't want to do it, but I had to. Better to have to see that look on her face – that helpless, horrified look, as she blinked down at yet another part of her life in ruins – than to watch her being dragged back to the bridge by her own gown-tails.

"No time for that, Sticky," I said before we hurried on, gently squeezing her shoulders. "Come on."

Five minutes later, we were cutting on the boosters and blazing off into space. Mimi and I sat in the cockpit, taking us God-knew-where to do fuck-if-we-knew-what, and Tak slouched in the cabin like a green banana peel, limp and empty. Silent. I realized she hadn't spoken a word since Zim had pulled her from her lounger.

What was there to say? We fled that day like fugitives, common criminals, from the Empire Tak had called _hers._ From the people who had exalted her at her Presentation and put their lives in her hands ever since.

The people we'd given twenty-two years of our lives, our dreams, our sweat and blood shed on the altar of their Empire—the people who put up with our petty arguments, who'd watched Vix taking her first steps, who sat with us in the mornings eating doughnuts and sipping _feeya_. Our subjects. Our _friends._ All but our family.

The people who, with barely a moment's hesitation, had just forsaken Tak for Zim. And all because of my dumbshit brother.


	63. Blindsided

**62. Blindsided**

_Vix speaking_

One night, before the evening meeting of my little task force, Effa and I sat in a small receiving-room in the administrative complex, talking over soda and nachos. We did that once or twice a week now – meet without Joy and Dib.

A few months into what Mum had called my _little revolution_, I'd taken stock of our progress, and realized I was spending more time arguing with Effa than enacting my reforms. So I'd informed her that, starting immediately, we were going to become friends if it killed us, because otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I guess I could've just sent her back to her pod and chosen another officer liaison – _any_ other officer liaison – but the thing was, I didn't want to. I was starting to like Effa. She was—I don't know, feisty. I had fun fighting with her. I got the feeling, too, that she was smarter than most officers, and could've actually contributed some useful ideas to our project if she weren't so determined to be against it.

Besides, she was kind of cute when you looked at her the right way. She wasn't as stumpy as the other Irkens, with those pretty emerald-colored eyes, and the swirls in her antennae reminded me of the clouds in the Japanese paintings I'd seen with Mom when I was a kid.

It wasn't like it had been with Tren. There was no love at first sight. I wasn't lying awake thinking about her at night, or mooning over her when I saw her. She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't perfect, and I felt absolutely no desire to take care of her; she was, in fact, irritating, and arrogant, and I often felt the urge to bean her with a brick. But when I didn't, I enjoyed her company, and I found her more interesting than most anything else on Earth. I wondered if that was what it had been like for my parents when they met.

Back when I'd first decided we'd have to be friends, I'd figured it would be easier if there were somewhere where we could relate to each other as equals – where I wasn't ordering her around as Director, and she wasn't my officer beating me with a riding crop. So I'd set up these meetings in the administrative complex, where neither of us was on the other's territory, and all we had to do was just…talk. Like normal people.

Which was easier said, at first, than done. But a year out from my return to Earth as Director, our conversations were finally civil, and on their way to something like friendly.

"So," I said on that particular night, after scooping some chili and cheese onto a nacho chip and popping it into my mouth. "Do you really hate humans all that much?"

Effa looked at me strangely. "What?"

"Well, you don't like me. You're a jerk to everybody in your pod. You've made it abundantly clear that you don't support my trying to improve conditions here, so…" I cocked my head curiously. "Why do you hate humans, Effa? They never did anything to you."

For a second, she didn't answer – just sucked on the straw of her soda, scowling down at its plastic lid. "I don't_ hate _humans," she grumbled at last. "No more than any Irken hates any slave race. I see them as inferior, but I have no reason to hate them." She paused, sighing.

"I was born for something better than this. When a smeet grows up taller than most of her generation, life is just _easier_ for her. People like her before they even meet her. She gets the good jobs, and she doesn't have to do much to get promoted. She ends up with a big ship with a bunch of servants, a great salary, and a couple of planets in her pocket, all while her old friends are still sweating in the Academy.

_"She _meaning _not me_," she clarified, with no small amount of resentment. "People say you're lucky, if you turn out as tall as I am, but I'm the unluckiest person I know. My whole life, I've been making the stupid mistakes that landed me in a place like this.

"I'm always in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I've got a fifty-fifty shot, I always lose. I say things that rub people the wrong way, and I place bets that don't pay off. You heard what happened before you were put in my pod, right? They gave you the number of a girl who committed suicide, because I didn't smell the blood until it was too late. If you hadn't shown up and distracted everybody, I'd have lost my job for that.

"What I'm saying is, this is far from the best job in the Empire, but if I _did_ lose it, you wouldn't have to talk to Tallest Tak to get me sent to planet Stink. 'Officer' is the highest rank I've had in a long time. I was a _jerk _to my pod because officers are expected to be – because that's how we're trained, and that's what we're told will yield the best results.

"Don't you get it? I'll hate whoever I have to hate if it'll pull me out of the muck I'm floundering in. If it'll stop everyone smirking at me all the time, because they look at me and they find out my rank and they know how miserably I've failed. How pathetic do you have to be, they think, to be so tall and still so _low_? Who's stupid enough to screw that up?

"And it doesn't help, you know," she added, glaring at me, "to have been picked for this ridiculous project. Everyone thinks you're going to fail, and I'm going to go down with you. They can't say it to your face, of course, but they can – and they _do_ – say it to mine."

I picked up another nacho and crunched as I thought, feeling glad I'd finally asked. It was a question that had been weighing on my mind for a long time, and Effa's answer, while it made sense, wasn't what I'd expected. It made me like her a little more, knowing she wasn't as conceited as she came off.

"Okay," I said. "I can live with that. But if you don't hate humans, why do you hate me?"

"Your humanity is no concern of mine," she sniffed. "The others might call you an abomination, but I don't care." She ate a couple of nachos and flicked a glob of chili off of her dress, smirking when it flew over the table between us and landed on my skirt.

"The reason I dislike you," she continued, reassembling her features into a frown, "is that you get everything you want without having to do anything. All my life, I've worked for the opportunity to be an officer, and yet you're given this directorship without lifting a finger. I'll never be important enough to _meet_ the Almighty Tallest, and yet you speak of her as if you're best friends, just because you're _isha_—because she gave you some DNA."

"But that's what you just said you wanted for yourself," I pointed out, raising my eyebrows. "To get things without working for them, like you're supposed to. Isn't it kind of hypocritical to say you don't like me for having something you'd take in a second?

Effa gave a self-deprecating snort. "Well that's just it, isn't it?" she said bitterly. "You're what I was supposed to be."

After that, we finished our sodas, demolished the rest of the nachos, and got up to meet Joy and Dib in the conference room. That night, we were reviewing progress reports from the first trial run of my reforms: a test group of humans transferred to one of the new barracks, on the updated schedule, supervised by an officer with strict orders not to be…well, a jerk.

Or at least, that was what I thought we'd be doing. When, not five minutes into our meeting, the doors to the conference room banged suddenly open, I was quickly proven wrong.

All four of our heads swiveled to meet the eyes of a pair of administrative officials, a male and a female, heading up a procession of nervous-looking attendants. "What's this about?" I demanded of the officials, instantly put off by the smug smiles on their faces. "You're interrupting a very important—"

"There's been a shift in priorities," the male official cut me off. "Your reforms have lost their sanction. This task force is being disbanded and all related activity must cease immediately, under direct orders from the Almighty Tallest."

"What are you talking about?" I could feel the blood draining out of my face, as if someone had pulled a stopper from my throat. "There must be some mistake."

"I assure you, there is no mistake. He was very clear."

"_What?_" My voice came out higher than I'd have liked it to, and I tried to force myself not to panic. Whatever was going on, there _had_ to be a rational explanation for it; this _had_ to be a mistake. Didn't it? "What do you mean, _he_? What did my mum tell you? You have no right to march in here and shut us down!"

The officials exchanged a disdainful glance. "Your _mum_ is no longer in a position to tell us anything," said the female, sniffing. "Haven't you heard? Tak has been deposed. There's a new Tallest now."

She might as well have punched me in the gut. For what seemed like a solid minute, I couldn't even breathe. Was that even _possible?_ I knew my history well enough to know it wasn't technically true, but from my perspective, Mum had been the Almighty Tallest forever; it was just who she was.

Her job was an inextricable part of her, and she could no more cease to be the Tallest than she could cease to be Irken. I could never have foreseen a day when that would change. For that matter, I couldn't imagine how, or _why_ – Irkens as tall as Mum didn't just come waltzing out of the woodwork for no reason.

"_Who_?" I finally managed.

"It doesn't matter. We owe you no explanation." The male official strode over to where I sat at the head of the table, as the rest of my committee watched with wide eyes. Certainly they weren't as horrified as I was, but the looks on all three of their faces spoke of a shock equal to mine.

"By the laws of the new regime, all persons of human descent are classified as human, and all humans must be part of the labor force. As of now, you and these other humans are slaves to the Irken Empire. Effa, you will be reassigned to a new post."

"You can't do that!" I burst out, hot tears building up in my eyes. Tears of frustration, confusion, fear – for myself, for Dib and Joy, for my parents. Where were they, if Mum had been _deposed_? What had happened to her? What about everyone else who'd made their home on the Massive: Mom, Mimi, PI and J4? "I demand to speak with my parents, _now_!"

In answer to that, the official whipped his shockrod out of its holster, switched it on, and struck me across the face. He hit me so hard I fell from my chair, crashing to the floor in a gasping, twitching pile of limbs made rigid by electricity. I lay there, panting for breath, straining to overcome the pain, as the attendants poured into the room.

They took us easily. Joy and Dib, even with him having a pak, were no match for their numbers. Before I knew it, I felt someone slap a deactivator disc onto the central port in my pak, and a set of laser-cuffs closing around my wrists. A pair of attendants pulled me up to march me out into the hall, Joy and Dib not far behind.

The last thing I saw of the room, as I glanced over my shoulder at the door, was Effa watching us go. She looked bewildered, blindsided, but otherwise her expression revealed nothing. I wished I could ask her if she was jealous of me now.


	64. Companions For the End of the World

**63. Companions For the End of the World**

_Gaz speaking_

For days, we drifted aimlessly in space, completely at a loss for the first time in twenty-two years. Where could we go? What could we _do_?

I sat in the cockpit of Tak's ship, turning those questions over and over in my head, while Tak lay catatonic in the cabin. There was no reaching her now. Ever since we'd left the Armada, she hadn't spoken, and she barely moved; she just slumped against the back wall, her eyes glassy, her face blank. Neither Mimi nor I could snap her out of it, for all we'd tried.

Honestly, though, I didn't blame her for checking out. How could I? I remembered a thought I'd had a long time ago, the morning after our first kiss, and amended it: _If I'd spent fifty years of my life trying to avenge myself on someone as functionally retarded as Zim, _then reigned as Queen of the Universe for twenty-two years, believing finally I'd won, and things were going to get better and stay that way, _only to end up where she was now, _watching Zim himself take my purpose and my people right out of my unsuspecting hands, _I figured I'd feel pretty hopeless too. _

So I let her vegetate, because what else did she have me for, except to pick up the slack when her brain went BSOD? I set about trying to figure out a plan of action. We weren't just going to hobble off like beaten dogs, that much I knew.

We were going to fight, until Tak was back on her throne or we were both smoking heaps of ash, but exactly how, I wasn't sure. We had absolutely zero support. I called everyone I could think of and nobody picked up, which I guess was better than whatever they might've had to say to me, but still far from helpful. Even my fleet had abandoned us.

More than anything, I wanted to head for Earth, to do two things: make sure Vix was okay, and kick my brother in the nuts. But that seemed as much an impossibility as anything else. I no longer had the luxury of visiting Earth as a dignitary, insulated by royal favor. If I showed up there, I'd be shoved into a barracks with the rest of the humans, and what good would I be to Tak then?

But what else was there to do? The more I thought about it, the more it looked as if all roads led to Earth. Vix was there. Dib was there. If I had them, I'd have at least two people (well, one _person_, and one cheese-brained horndog I was itching to beat black and blue) on my side, and I'd have someone to _talk_ to – someone to help me formulate a plan.

As it was, I was losing my mind shut up with the near-comatose Tak and the as-ever-unspeaking Mimi. I loved them both to death, but they were shaping up to be shit companions for the end of the world.

I thought wryly back to my sentiment at the assimilation of Earth. For seven billion people, the end of the Earth was the end of the universe, but to us it had been business as usual. Now, Zim's ascent was the end of _our _universe, but to twenty billion Irkens – twenty billion Irkens and innumerable members of a hundred slave races, who had seen Tallests come and go, who didn't care whose name succeeded the title or whose body occupied the throne – it was just another day.

As it turned out, the decision about what to do was soon taken out of my hands. A few days' travel from where we'd left the Armada, we were apprehended by a small squadron of Irken police cruisers, surrounding and signaling us. To avoid a dogfight we were sure to lose, I slowed and let them board.

"By decree of the Almighty Tallest, there will no longer be any exceptions issued on the status of persons hailing from conquered worlds," the squadron leader addressed me. "If you agree to come quietly, we will escort you back to Earth. If not, we will not hesitate to dispatch this ship and all aboard it."

I sighed. "I'll come." I glanced over my shoulder at Tak and Mimi, then back at the squadron leader. "Give me a minute to put things in order here."

He nodded stiffly and returned to his cruiser. I guess that was all the respect I'd earned, commanding an Irken fleet for twenty-two years.

Tak didn't acknowledge me when I knelt next to her. "Take her down to wherever's closest and safest," I said quietly to Mimi, who sat on her other side, "and stay there. I'll find you when I can." I slid an arm around Tak's shoulders, pulled her against me, and pressed a kiss onto her forehead. "I'll be back, Sticky. Soon."

She didn't even look at me.

As the squadron leader's cruiser took off for Earth, I noticed that the planet we were closest to was Shrith. I wasn't sure whether to feel bitter at the irony, or to be comforted by the fact that, even if I'd had my pick of planets for Tak to hide out on, I couldn't have chosen a better one. At least there, she would have the memory of having been happy.

By the next morning, we had arrived on Earth, where I was promptly received and put through a humiliating round of processing. Thus, clad in a grey jumpsuit, with a deactivator disc attached to my pak and the number 799845-900 lasered onto my arm, I was escorted to the factory where pod 799845 was hard at work packing long steel girders into huge crates.

Naturally, the women of the pod weren't thrilled to see me – like I told Vix, I'd heard it all before – but I was way past letting a bunch of slave bitches intimidate me, and I let them know it fast. I had bigger things to worry about than 899 shooting me the stink eye.

And as it appeared, so did they. From what I overheard from the officers, I gathered that Zim had issued more than one decree in the past couple of days, and he had informed every last shrimpy green asswipe in the Empire that they were going to make his reign _better _than Tak's in all possible ways (and several that probably weren't).

In our case, that meant working longer hours to fill higher quotas, cutting back on rations to save money, and catching five hours of sleep, at most, per night – in other words, blasting at breakneck speed down the trail opposite the one Vix had been hoping to blaze with her reforms. I didn't know if it was working, according to whatever definition Zim was using, but I stepped over more than one woman who'd passed out with a girder over her shoulder.

When I saw my pod's officer, ordered to resort to whatever means were necessary to 'motivate' her pod to meet the new demands, beat a woman to death with a steel club for falling short of her quota, I knew it was do or die – literally. If we didn't come up with a way to take him down, Zim would wipe out all of the slave races in a matter of months, and kill the Empire with the same damn stone.

Not long after I'd been 'escorted' back to Earth, I seized an opportunity to slip out at lunch while my officer wasn't looking, and rode the capsule rail to the mess building where Vix's pod would be. I was guessing they'd stuck her back where she was before – 2708, if I remembered the number on Tren's arm correctly. _Just let that walking broccoli try to beat me when I get back, _I said grimly to myself. _Just let her fucking try._

When I arrived at the mess building marked 2708, I peered through the crack between the doors to pinpoint where Vix was sitting. Then I snuck into the mess, grabbed her by the arm, and tugged her back outside with me before her officer looked our way.

"Mom!" she cried when the mess doors closed, with something halfway between joy and dismay. She threw her arms around me and I hugged her back tightly, feeling her shaking. I hadn't realized how afraid I was for her until I found her safe.

"What's going on?" she asked, wiping away tears, when she'd let me go and stepped back. "No one will tell me anything. What happened? How? _Why?_"

"Look, it's a long story, babe," I said, "but let me try to make it simple for you. You remember that little prick who inspired your mum to come back to Earth? The one who made J4?" She nodded. "Yeah, well, a couple of days ago, he showed up on the Massive looking like he'd been doing shots of Miracle-Gro, if you get my drift. The whole thing was over before it started, Vix. I'm just glad you weren't there."

"So where's Mum now?" she said anxiously. "Is she okay?"

"She's—well, she's safe. She's with Mimi. I wouldn't say she's in good shape."

"I bet," Vix sighed, looking crushed on Tak's behalf. "I probably wouldn't be either, if I were her. How did you end up here? Are you sure she'll be all right without you?"

"How do you think? A couple of police cruisers brought me in. I'd probably have given myself up anyway, though, just to get in touch with someone who's on our side." I reached out to squeeze Vix's shoulder, smiling as best I could for her sake. "Don't worry about Tak. Mimi will take care of her for now. And when we get out of this shit heap, we're going to put her back where she ought to be."

"You mean we're going to do something?" Vix asked, her eyes wide. "You have a plan?"

"Not as of now, but I will. _We_ will. So start thinking, okay? You know what they say—where there's a will, there's a way."

Vix nodded again and breathed deeply, as if trying to assure herself that it was true. I felt a surge of sureness that my being here was the right thing, however grim our situation seemed now. It was beyond a relief just to be able to _talk_ to someone, to know that someone had worried about us, to feel that we had even one ally in the universe. At least Vix wouldn't ditch us when the going got rough.

"What about J4?" she said suddenly, fear piercing her features. "You didn't leave her behind, did you? Zim _hates_ her. If she's on the Massive with him, he'll kill her, I know he will."

"We didn't have _time_ for her, Vix. We had to get out before he killed _us_." Vix blinked at me, horrified, and I assured her, "J4 will be fine. Zim's not the sharpest crayon in the box; I'd be impressed if he even remembered she was on the Massive.

"And if he does, she'll have a fighting chance with PI, so long as they stay away from GIR. We'll think about her when we can afford to, and I swear we'll do whatever we can to help her - but right now, I think you can see we've got bigger fish to fry.

"Speaking of J4," I added, remembering that I didn't have much time to work with, "I need to find your uncle. Do you know which pod they put him in?"

She furrowed her brow a second, then said, "40506, I think. It was a pretty easy number to remember. If you're quick, you might be able to catch him right as they're going in for lunch."

"Thanks, hon. I'm gonna go see if I can grab him, but you'll see me again before long. In the meantime, don't let these asshole officers get you down; we'll make them see what's what soon enough."

I pulled her in to hug her again. "We're not going down without a fight, Vix," I whispered into her ear – her perfectly perfect jade-statue ear, now, with every other hand-carved part of her, at the narrow mercy of our friends-turned-enemies. "I promise."

I sent Vix back into the mess and hopped back into my capsule, cruising down the rail to mess building 40506. As Vix had predicted, the pod was just marching in, so I ducked around a corner of the building to wait for Dib to pass by. When he did, I darted out, snatched him by his sleeve, and dragged him around the corner before the rest of his row had figured out what was going on.

"Gaz? What are you—"

I shut him up right off the bat when I socked him in the face, so hard he stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. As he whimpered and moaned, lying there on his back with his glasses askew, I stood over him and jammed my foot into his groin with the force of a nail gun. He would never be able to repay me for the shit he'd already put me through, but the howl he let out then wasn't a bad start.

When he got his breath back, after a solid thirty seconds of red-faced gulps and groans, he managed to gasp, "What the _fuck _was that for?"

"For ruining _abso-fucking-lutely everything_." I crouched beside him, got a fistful of his collar, and pulled his face up close to mine. "Do you _know_," I hissed, "who the new Tallest is? Who dethroned Tak, enslaved us, and will probably work the human race to death within a couple of months?"

"No! How should I?"

"Let me give you a hint. Think about every moronic, self-obsessed, power-hungry little jerkwad you fucked about a year ago, on an uncolonized planet in a far-off galaxy where you thought no one would ever have to know." He paled instantly, his eyes bugging out. "Only one? That ought to narrow it down."

I let him go and he scrambled to his feet, looking baffled, stunned, and nauseous. He lurched and backed up against the wall of the mess building, grasping at the cement blocks as if they – as if anything – could help him now.

"B-but that's not—how could—you aren't—are you serious? A-are you fucking serious right now?" He shut his eyes, clutching his temples. "Shit. _Shit._ How did you _know_?"

"Because you can't just go around boning Irkens, Dib! Because _this_ is what happens!" I threw my arms out to indicate everything around us. "This is all _your goddamn fault!_ The worst possible person you could _ever_ put in charge of _anything_ now has absolute power over the entire Irken Empire, because _you_ planted your seed and sprouted a beanstalk!"

He looked at me with total incomprehension. "_What_?"

"I don't know if you ever stopped to think about this, but Tak didn't get to be the Almighty Tallest by wishing on a fucking star. Don't ask me to explain why – it's some shit about hormones and genetic engineering - but that's what happens, get it? You fuck them, they start growing like weeds, and before you know it you've fucked their whole power structure too. Which is why you _don't_ fuck them—_especially not ZIM!"_

"This is ridiculous!" he yelled. "You can't blame me for that! How the hell was I supposed to know what I was doing? It's not exactly a logical conclusion to draw!" He spat out a frustrated hybrid of a growl and a shout, striking uselessly at the air. "For fuck's sake, Gaz, you could've _told _me!"

"Well, excuse me for not knowing you needed to hear about the Irken birds and bees! How the hell was _I _supposed to know that you were planning on nailing - holy balls, I still can't believe it – _Zim_?"

"I didn't plan it," he muttered miserably, sinking down against the wall. "It just sort of…happened."

Seeing few other options, I came over and sat down beside him, shoving a hand through my hair. It was amazing, I thought, how much better I felt now that I'd smacked him around a little, and screamed my frustrations out in his face. I could almost be civil to him now.

"You know, you ought to try to explain this to your officer," I said after a minute, smirking. "You might be able to get yourself a gig as royal consort. Better than this place, right?"

He frowned at me. "Can you stop making fun of me for like five seconds, please? This is a serious situation we're in."

"You think I don't understand that? I watched Zim literally run Tak off the bridge of the Massive. She was practically catatonic when I saw her last. I know exactly how serious this situation is." I drew a deep breath through my nose. "But we're going to fix it. I don't know how or when, but I know we're damn well going to fix it. And when I figure something out," I added, punching him semi-lightly in the arm, "you're going to help me."

"Hey, you don't have to tell me twice," he said wearily. "I'm not crazy about her on a personal level, but I'll readily admit that Tak is a better Almighty Tallest than Zim."

"Damn straight. And I make a much better royal consort, too."


	65. Truth in the Empire

**64. Truth in the Empire**

_Vix speaking_

After Mum was overthrown, things on Earth got bad fast. Most days, it was all we could do just to stay alive. When I'd lived as a slave under Mum's regime, it had been hard, but bearable; she and the people she employed to govern the slave races understood how to balance the demands of the Empire with the demands of the human body.

Zim, as Mom would say, didn't give a shit. Our quotas were doubled and our rations halved. Many nights, as punishment for not meeting our quotas, my pod sat all night in the factory sweating over our paint guns; more than once, I fell asleep at the belt. Shockrods were unsheathed at little to no provocation, and riding crops were switched out for steel clubs.

They had to be, because the guard robots' numbers had been severely reduced to save money – meaning that not only did the officers have to be tougher, they had to work longer hours with fewer breaks, for lower wages than they'd been getting under Mum. We were all suffering, Irkens and humans, but the Irkens were the ones who had brought this on us all.

It was hard not to resent them for turning so completely on Mum. Mom said I shouldn't waste the energy – that they were all just a bunch of glassy-eyed green sheep, bleating and shuffling along after the tallest shepherd in the pasture, and I shouldn't take it personally on Mum's behalf – but I was bitter nonetheless.

I wondered if Effa was as blind as the rest of them. She seemed too smart for that, but she hadn't said anything that day in the conference room, and I hadn't seen her since. While she'd been working with me for the past year, a new officer had been assigned to 2708.

Less than three weeks into Zim's reign, our situation was as dire as I thought it could possibly be. I was half-starved, exhausted, and beaten bloody every day. I couldn't hold the valve on my paint gun without my hands shaking.

All around me, humans were dying – of starvation, of exhaustion, of a blow with a steel club to the skull. Some, overlooked by an intervention system stretched too thin, pulled off killing themselves. When Mom had found me during the first days, we had sworn we'd reclaim the Empire; now, I wasn't sure we'd live to see next week.

Then – all of a sudden – everything got infinitely worse.

I stirred one morning not to the sound of the buzzer, but to the _clang_ of feet descending the ladders around me, and pattering out the barracks' doors. For a moment, I panicked, bracing for a beating – then, when I sat up and glanced around, noticed that I wasn't the only one still in bed. The pod was waking and leaving in a trickle, not in the usual wave, and our officer was nowhere to be seen.

Rubbing my eyes and pulling on my shoes, I climbed down the ladder to the floor, where a couple of girls shoved past me in a hurry to get to the doors. I followed them to find the street outside the barracks in chaos.

Humans in their grey jumpsuits ran back and forth between barracks and down the streets, shouting, sobbing, cowering in corners or embracing one another. A few Irken officers sprinted through the crowd on their way out of the compound. The noise was unbearable, a cacophony of voices made unintelligible by volume and overlap, filling the tunnels created by the barracks-lined streets.

Frightened and disoriented, I searched the swarm of humans for someone I knew, until my eyes lit on Joy pressed against a barracks wall. I made my way over to her and touched her shoulder, asking desperately, "What is this? What's going on?"

She turned to me, terrified like I'd never seen her. Of everyone I'd worked with over the past year, Joy was the most calm, the most level-headed, the most likely to put on a poker face in almost any situation – and here she stood looking at me as if she were about to wet her pants.

"Word came in early this morning," she said in a trembling whisper. "The Tallest isn't satisfied with our production numbers, so he's going to eliminate the Earth completely. The Earth, and everyone who's still here this time tonight."

No wonder things had fallen apart. If Zim was going to destroy the Earth, the Irken personnel wouldn't be bothering with their jobs; they'd be scrambling to grab their ships from storage and get off the planet as soon as possible. They knew as well as I did that he wouldn't hesitate because a few hundred of them were still milling about the surface.

Tilting back my head, I saw scores of red and purple cruisers streaking through the sky above us, some queuing at the ports, others, unwilling to wait for clearance, lasering holes in the shell. I found myself thinking that with the artificial oxygen leaking, a good number of humans might be dead before Zim even got here.

Before I could really freak out, I felt someone grab my arm, and when I whipped around I saw that it was Mom. "You heard what's going on?" she asked, and I nodded. "Then come on. We've got to get the fuck out of here."

I frowned and jerked my arm out of her grip. "Well, first of all, we're not going anywhere just you and me. What about Dib?"

"Yeah, what about him? He's a big boy, he can take care of himself." I eyed her meaningfully, folding my arms. She groaned. "Look, I don't even know how we're supposed to get to him. Every Irken on the planet is making a mad dash to this or that sector of the storage hangar, so the capsule rail is beyond clogged. What do you suggest we do – _walk_ the fifty miles to pod 40506?"

"No. The sector of the hangar where my ship is stored is just a few blocks from here; there's an entrance in the next compound. It'll take us five minutes."

I turned to Joy, who still stood there paper-white and stock-still, clutching the metal pendant she'd told me was called a cross. "Don't worry, okay?" I did my best to reassure her, even though I wasn't feeling so sure myself. "Don't give up hope. We're not just going to let this happen."

"It figures," Mom was grumbling as we made our way down to the storage hangar, a massive underground complex with a multitude of sections and entrances. Fortunately, no one had remembered to adjust the readers, so with no officers around to stop us, I was able to swipe my palm and retrieve my ship. "It just fucking figures. That little bastard's always got to one-up Tak. This doesn't have shit to do with _production numbers_, and anyone who knows Zim knows it; he missed his chance to take over the Earth, so he's just going to nuke it."

Once we'd boarded my ship and brought it up out of the hangar, it took us less than a minute to zip the distance to Dib's pod. "All right, are you happy?" Mom demanded when we found him. "Let's blow this burger joint already. Who knows how long it'll take the Armada to get here?"

I shook my head. "Mom, we can't just _leave_."

"What are you talking about? We _have_ to. I know it sucks, Vix, but the Earth is already history. There's nothing we can do."

"No!" I almost shouted it, and Mom and Dib looked at me like I was crazy. But the moment I saw the fear on Joy's face, I hadn't even had to think about this. I wasn't backing down.

"I'm _not _just going to leave nearly five billion people here to die," I said fiercely. "I came here to right the wrongs we've done to the human race, not to stand by and watch it burn. Besides," I added on a wrier note, "if we really can't come up with _anything_, we might as well stay here and die with everyone else, because there isn't much pride in living if you can't even outsmart Zim."

"Well, you've got that much right," Mom said with a snort. She paused, thought briefly, and sighed. "Listen, Vix, I'm with you on whatever you want to do, but you've got to give us something go on here. How are we supposed to stop this from happening?"

"I think we're already past the point of _stopping_ it. Even if we could keep Zim from wasting the planet, we'd just be sentencing everyone to a slower, uglier end. Look." I nodded to my ship's viewscreen, displaying an image of the sky. Already, swirls of red clouds were dissipating through the escape hatches cut by fleeing Irkens; the air outside would be thinning as we spoke.

"With all of those holes in the shell, the atmospheric generators won't be able to sustain the population. You're right, Mom: Earth is history. We need to evacuate it, and fast."

"Evacuate it _how_?" Dib said doubtfully. "You're going to make enough trips between here and…wherever to evacuate four and a half billion people in less than twelve hours? In _this_ ship? I don't even want to do that math."

"I know, I know. I'd never make it in time. Not even close. I'd have to choose a few people and leave the rest, and I…well, I'm not going to do that." I pushed a hand through my hair, chewing on my lower lip as I tried to brainstorm solutions. "There's no ship that's going to get everyone off of Earth in the time we've got to work with. We'd have to use teleporters – the high-capacity depopulation kind."

"The kind they store on the Massive, you mean." Mom raised her eyebrows at me. "Is that what you're thinking?"

"I don't see that we have any other choice."

"Wait, _what_?" Dib spluttered, his eyes bugging at us both. "Are you kidding me? You want us to go back to the same place they ran Gaz and Tak out of less than three weeks ago, and…what? Put on our ninja costumes and heist a bunch of teleporters, all without anybody, you know, _noticing_?"

"Sure, why not?" Mom said airily, ready to throw her weight on my side if it meant watching her brother flip out. "You can be the distraction."

"The—what?"

"You know, the distraction. We get our ninja on, you go make sure Mister Doombringer doesn't notice. Stall for more time. We're going to need it, if we expect to get to the Armada and back before they get here."

"But…but…" Dib blinked, sheepishly scratching the back of his neck. "Why me? Am I really that—uh, distracting?"

"Trust me, Dib," Mom said with a smirk. "If you were any good, you'll be _very _distracting."

I was somewhat distracted myself, puzzling out the logistics of the plan. It seemed too easy. What was the catch? "It won't work," I said, dispirited, when it dawned on me. "We won't even be able to get near the Massive. The only vessels we have access to are my ship and Dib's cruiser, and they're registered as belonging to – what did they call it? – _persons of human descent. _If they see us coming, the Armada will shoot us down before we have so much as a chance."

"Shit. I guess they will, won't they?" Mom furrowed her brow. "You sure there's no other ship we can use?"

"I don't think so. I don't know where—" Suddenly, a light clicked on in my head, and I cut myself short. "Wait! Effa's in good standing with the Empire, so far as I know. I could ask if she'll lend us her cruiser, provided she's still around."

Dib looked at me uncertainly. "You think she'll go for it?"

"I have no idea. But I've got to try."

In my ship's onboard lab, I removed all of our deactivator discs, and went about trying to page Effa on my pak. She didn't pick up, but the signal bounced off of a receiver on Earth, so at least I knew she hadn't left yet. While Mom and Dib began hashing out the details of our plan, I fed the signal's coordinates to my ship's computer.

We rose from the ground in the barracks compound and took off following it, cruising low, skimming the rooftops of quickly-emptying buildings. Below us, roiling masses of grey filled the streets between the barracks, brightened only occasionally by thumbprints of fast-moving green. Above, a crack arced across the Earth's protective shell, its integrity compromised by the gradually-multiplying holes.

My ship tracked Effa's signal to just outside her dormitory in the officer's compound, and it was there that I landed and disembarked. I found her hurrying through the square where Mum's statue had once stood – where the space atop the stone base was now achingly empty, as if the wind blowing through it might sigh a note more sadly than it did anywhere else.

"Effa!" I caught her by the arm as she dashed past me. She whirled on me, looking as frantic as every other Irken I'd seen that day. "I need you to help me."

"Are you crazy?" she snapped, yanking loose. "Whatever it is, the answer is no. All I'm doing is getting off this planet, and if you had any sense, you would be too."

"Wait!" Before she could dart off, I grabbed her again, this time by both shoulders, and spun her back around to face me. "_Please, _Effa. If we don't do something, nearly five billion innocent people are going to die. You can't tell me that doesn't mean anything to you."

"I can and I am. First of all, why should I care what happens to a bunch of humans? Second—" She let out a sharp huff of breath, glaring up at me. "If I help you save even one person, I'm betraying my Tallest. Do you suppose he's going to destroy the Earth because he _wants _the humans to live?"

"That's bullshit and you know it! What did Zim ever do for you? What did he ever do for _anyone_? What reason do any of you have to be loyal to him?"

"It's not about _reasons_," she hissed.

"Then what is it about?"

Effa glowered at me for a moment, fuming, tightening and releasing her fists. Hope sparked inside me; at least she was smart enough to know, on some level, how ridiculous the lines she was spouting were. "As if I could expect you to understand!" she spat at last. "You're not even really Irken! You're just upset because your mummy can't give you everything you want anymore, and life isn't being handed to you on a silver platter!"

"No, I'm _upset_ because I actually thought for awhile that you were smarter than a pile of rocks, and now you're acting like you're about as blind as one, too. Effa," I pleaded, lowering my voice a little, leaning down to look her in the eyes, "if we could get people like you on our side, we could put things back the way they're supposed to be.

"You _know_ it was better before. You _must_ know, you're not stupid—look around you! Look at what's become of Earth! The humans are miserable, the Irkens are miserable, _nothing_ is getting done, and Zim's solution is to blow it all up! You _can't _look at that and say this is the Empire you're loyal to. You know whose statue should stand in this square, Effa. You know what the truth is."

As she looked at me, her expression shifted slowly from one of anger to one of what I could only call weariness – a square-shouldered, stiff-jawed weariness, showing not in her body but in her eyes. The dull painted eyes of a tin soldier, tired of marching towards the same horizon, but prisoner to the key in her back.

"There is no truth in the Empire, Vix," she said quietly. "There is only the Tallest."

"Effa…" I sighed and let go of her shoulders, but she didn't run away. She just stood there, her brow knit, staring sort of distantly at me. That was when it occurred to me – why keep trying to crank the key in the wrong direction, when maybe there was another way altogether to make her move? "What about me?"

"What?"

"Forget the Tallest. What about me? If you won't help me for the humans' sake—if you won't help me for my mum's sake—if you won't even help me to help yourself, then help me because I asked you to." I grinned. "As a personal favor."

She shook her head quickly, snapping herself back into her temper. "Why on Irk would I want to do _you_ a favor?" she said, frowning.

"I don't know. Because I like you. Because that's probably more than you can say for most of the other people you know."

Her cheeks turned an indignant shade of dark green – almost the same color as her eyes. "Is that how you try to convince someone to help you?"

"Well, it's true, isn't it? Tell me you know anybody else who would have you switched out of your pod and onto her task force because she thinks you're fun to fight with. Anybody who could take a year of your yelling, your shockrod, your _beating her with a frickin' riding crop_, and want to be around you anyway. Anybody you've ever told the things you told me that day three weeks ago, before they shut us down."

I cocked my head at her. "Just one person, Effa. I'm waiting."

She glared at the ground, a muscle working in her jaw. "Don't attempt to make me responsible for your stupidity," she grumbled. "One would think that if you _knew_ there was no one else foolish enough to entangle themselves with me, you would understand that it's a poor choice."

"Foolishness is relative. If you do anything stupid for enough time with enough passion, it'll work out all right eventually."

She snorted. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"Yeah, so? Will you help me or not?"

There was a brief silence. Then, Effa made a great show of rolling her eyes, and pushing out a noisy breath, and sounding very put-upon when she said, "If it'll make you shut up long enough for me to get off of this doomed dirt clod, then I will do what I must."

"That sounds like a _yes_ to me!"

Thrilled beyond the point of inhibition, I grabbed her, kissed her, and took her hand to tug her off across the square with me, not even thinking to glance behind me to see the look on her face. "Come on, let's go!" I cried as I ran. "We've got to get this done yesterday!"


	66. Weird Chemicals

**65. Weird Chemicals**

_Dib speaking_

_Okay, now _go_, _Gaz had hissed at me once Effa dropped us off in the Massive's docking bay, shoving me over to a hoverdisc. _We don't have time to waste. Go up there and find Zim, if the coast is clear; if it's not, I'm sure his army of cheeseheads will take you to him. _

_Stall him for as long as you can. We're going to take the service drones' transport tubes up into the storage pods, and we'll page you when we've got what we need. We want a good head start, so don't leave for at least ten minutes after we do – longer, if you can help it. Think you can manage that without screwing it up?_

_Yeah, fine, _I'd answered, _except for the part where you're, you know, trying to strand me here. A head start is all well and good, but what am _I_ supposed to do once _you're_ gone?_

_Look, don't get your panties in a wad, okay? _she'd said. _There are a couple of spare cruisers down here. They're not registered to anyone, so if you don't decide you want to stick around and shack up with Zim – since he's obviously such a sex god – you can just grab one and go. _

_Wait! _Before I could step onto the hoverdisc, Vix's hand shot out to grab my arm, and she said urgently, _You have to get J4. We won't have the time – I mean, we're not even going up into the ship proper, so…. _She'd paused to glance pleadingly at Gaz, who shook her head. _So it's up to you. I don't care what she says, _make_ her come with you. She's in danger here. You have to get her out._

Thus laden with responsibilities, I wandered across the decks of the Massive, looking for Zim. The coast was not only clear, but eerily deserted, the silence and emptiness such that my footsteps echoed in the corridors. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, given the state of the Armada. We'd approached in Effa's cruiser to find it decimated, like a herd of cattle thinned by a drought; only a handful of retainer vessels still drifted around the Massive.

By the time I reached the doors to the bridge, I hadn't run into a single Irken. If there were any still around, they were well-hidden. Doing my best to shrug off the strangeness of it all, I stepped forward as the doors slid open, and ventured cautiously onto the bridge.

There, too, the crew was nowhere to be seen. Without them to populate the ring around the platform, the bridge had exactly two significant features: the giant viewscreen, displaying a rectangle of ink-colored space, and Zim, reclining in Tak's lounger, his back to me. He didn't seem to hear me as I crossed the platform. Even when I came up to stand beside the lounger, he didn't look at me – just sat there staring at the viewscreen, his eyes glazed, their lids at half-mast.

It was a stupid thing to be thinking, at a time like this, but I found myself noticing that he didn't look half bad this way. Along with his vacant expression, he wore black pants and a high-collared, double-breasted red jacket. Like Tak's, the shape of his body was more humanoid than the other Irkens', with a definable chest and shoulders and waist.

Having been, when I'd last seen him, a triangle with limbs and a head, he had become a more complex creature, with lines and planes and a long, slender silhouette. His antennae were longer and he held them at a different angle, lower. Even the structure of his face had changed, though not such that I could really describe it – he just looked different, and it definitely wasn't bad.

I noticed, too, how he slumped self-consciously in the lounger, half-stuffed into it and half-sprawling out of it, like he couldn't figure out what to do with all of this extra Zim-ness for which he was suddenly responsible. It seemed to me that Irkens never knew what to do with themselves when they were more than three feet tall. Even Tak sometimes carried her height awkwardly, and she'd been that way for twenty-plus years.

Maybe that was why they used to shove their leaders into that weird shit the Tallest before Tak always wore, on the few occasions I'd seen them. Maybe it was easier to live like that, as a floating stack of balls and tubes, than as what amounted to a whole different species.

"So," I finally said, for fear we'd stand there in silence all day otherwise. "Been awhile."

"Hm?" He blinked and glanced up at me, apparently unsurprised. Like he'd been expecting me all along. "Yeah. Long time."

So far, this was by a long stretch the most normal conversation we'd ever had, and I didn't like it. "Zim," I said uneasily, "where _is_ everyone?"

"Everyone? Everyone who? Address me as _my Tallest, _disrespectful meatbag. What are you talking about?"

I snorted. "You're a lot of things to me, Zim, but you will _never _be my Tallest_. _Where's the bridge crew? Where's the staff of the Massive? What happened to the Armada?"

"Oh, you mean _that _everyone." He flicked a hand dismissively. "They're gone. Couldn't do anything right. I kept trying to make things better, and they just made them worse. All of my ingenious reforms, ruined by their incompetence. Would you believe they've got the Tharlian emperor on the verge of declaring war with us? I had to fire them. Brainless pack of vermin, besmirching the venerable name of Zim."

"Then who the hell is running the Massive?"

"Cease your bellowing, hysterical Dib-beast. There's still a skeleton crew. I've simply ordered them to make themselves scarce, as the sight of their faces disgusts me."

"What about GIR? Is he here?"

"Sure, sure. He's around somewhere." He rolled his eyes and sighed. "I don't see why you're so worried about all of this. I am more than capable of commanding this fleet unassisted; I wouldn't be sitting in this lounger if I weren't."

"Well, there's some circular logic for you."

"And now you're babbling about geometry. Have you nothing more interesting to say to me?"

A certain glint came into his eyes then, as they moved slowly from my face down to my feet, and one corner of his mouth hitched in a half-smile. _Distracting _was damn right – I was distracted just looking at him looking at me like that. "As I recall, when last I saw you, you had finally presented me with a pursuit worthy of my time."

I remembered something Gaz had told me in Effa's cruiser on the way here. _You know, if you _can't _distract him, _she'd said to me, _and we end up watching the Earth burn from the Massive's prison hold, I'm going to be disappointed in you on more than one level. This should be about the easiest job in the universe for you right now. _

_See, this whole boning-Irkens thing – it's not a one-time gig. She wouldn't admit it to anyone, but after I broke Tak's seal, she couldn't get enough of me—kept coming back like a crack addict, jonesing for a fix. If you can't get Zim to pay attention to you after you've been gone a whole year, you might as well castrate yourself then and there._

Of course, unlike Tak, Zim was never ashamed of anything. The way Gaz told it, she'd practically had to hold Tak down to give her what she wanted; Zim, on the other hand, had never been shy in the service of his own desires. "Right," I said as indifferently as I could, hoping that the warmth I felt in my cheeks didn't show. "Well—that's what made you this way, you know."

"Really?" he said, with surprise so mild it was barely surprise at all – like I'd just told him there was going to be a good movie on TV tonight. "Huh. Then it's a good thing I thought of it."

"_You_ thought of it? But I—" I paused, frowning. "So if it'd turned you into a sea cucumber, it'd have been _my_ idea, right?"

"Of course. I didn't think I'd have to explain that." He drummed his fingers a few times on the arm of the lounger, further considering what I'd said. "You know, Dib-rat," he said after a minute, smirking, "if I had known this was what you had to give me, I would have demanded it much sooner."

"Oh, yeah. Wasted all that time chasing me in circles on Earth, when you could've been up here screwing over the Empire. Talk about a loss."

This time, he picked up on my sarcasm. "You speak nonsense, Earth vermin," he snapped. "Zim has _screwed over_ no one. It has indeed been a loss to the Empire, not having me in charge all this time. Unsurprisingly, Tak didn't know what she was doing with this job, but _I_ have corrected her mistakes; under _my_ brilliant leadership, my people are more prosperous than ever."

"Come on. Do you really believe that?" I put my hand on the back of the lounger and swiveled it around so that he was facing me.

"You said it yourself, Zim. Things are falling apart. You're on the brink of intergalactic war. The Armada is less than half what it used to be. You're working your labor force to death, and nuking conquered worlds just for the hell of it. Tak kept the Empire stable for twenty-two years; you've been running things less than a month and it's in pieces. You must know she's a better Tallest than you're ever going to be."

"I know nothing!" He shoved my hand off of the lounger and spun back around to face the viewscreen, glowering, his arms folded across his chest. "If you have come here only to insult me," he growled, "don't think I'm just going to sit here and take it. My crew may be smaller than it once was, but there are more than enough guards onboard to throw you into the hold."

I gave him a minute to stew before I tried again. "Look at yourself. You're not even happy."

"No, _you_ look at me, and tell me what it is you're missing. Billions of Irkens long to inhabit this body, and only I am worthy of it. What fool could sit where I sit and be unhappy?"

"Well, Tak wasn't," I said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "My sister said it was hard for her, at first. She wasn't used to having so much power, and so much responsibility. Gaz said it took her a whole year to stop wincing when people called her _my Tallest._"

Zim snorted derisively. "Then Tak is that fool."

There was another brief silence. Then I said, more quietly than I'd said anything to that point, "You don't _have_ to do this, you know."

"How many times must I tell you, you gibbering pork slab?! This is what I _want_!" He rose sharply from the lounger, and for the first time since sixth grade, we stood looking each other in the eyes. Never in my life had one moment been so bittersweet.

"You were useful to me for a short time on Qfpcb," he hissed an inch from my face, "and perhaps because of that you believe you understand me. But you understand nothing. You are a pathetic sack of Earth jelly who has only ever done one thing of value to anyone, and even that unintentionally. You know nothing of what I _have _to do, or what makes me _happy_."

"Fine." I took a step backwards, feeling that to put my hands on him to shove him away from me would somehow be a concession. "If it'll make you happy to sit here alone for the rest of your life, watching the Empire crumble around you, knowing that your people hate you, then fine. Just checking."

"My people don't hate me." His anger suddenly dialed down, he wandered the few steps back to his lounger, resting his hand on top of it without sitting down. He blinked at the viewscreen, into the dark river of space carrying us to Earth. "They can't."

"Oh, so that's what you want. To spend your life with people who _have_ to like you, because of some weird chemical seeing you spills in their brains? Don't you think it would be worth it," I pressed on, without even really thinking about what I was saying, "giving up all those people, if it meant being with one person who gave half a fuck about you _before_ any of this?"

He sort of sniffed as he turned back to me, regarding me with dulled, narrowed eyes. "And who_ is_ that person, Dib?"

I didn't say anything. How could I? Nothing was ever so easy for me, and especially not between Zim and I. There was always another battle to fight, because neither of us ever dealt the killing blow. We just circled each other and showed our teeth, threatening, never striking.

After a few seconds, he dropped my eyes, and flopped back down in the lounger. I would never know what might have happened, had I answered him – or for that matter, what I would have said.

"You could stay," came his voice from behind the backrest of the lounger, after what seemed a thousand years of silence.

That, at least, I had no problem answering. "Yeah, and I could stick my head in a blender," I said, "but I'm not going to do that, either." Being with Zim wasn't necessarily a bad thing (and in any case, good or bad, it was looking like a pretty inescapable case of destiny), but being with him here, like this—there wasn't even a question. "Thanks for the invitation, but no."

I hadn't been paying so much as an approximation of attention to my pak, so I didn't know if Gaz had paged me or if I was okay to go, but I felt it was time I left. The bridge, big as it was – bigger than it had ever seemed, with only he and I to occupy it – was making me claustrophobic, and I feared that the longer I stayed there, the more likely it was I'd say or do something that I would regret.

Besides, head start or no, I didn't think we were in much danger of Zim reaching Earth before we did. The Massive wasn't moving at full speed, and Zim, slumped in the lounger, didn't seem interested in changing that.

"Listen, I'm going to go," I said, heading for the edge of the platform. "See you around, Zim."

"Have you ever considered," he said, like he hadn't even heard me, "that human emotions – the ones that motivate you to do things like you did on Qfpcb – are little more than _weird chemicals_ themselves? Whatever you feel about me, or yourself, or anything…just a scalpel and a steady hand, just a snip to the right wire in your brain, and it could all be changed."

"I guess," I said before I left. "I'd like to think it's not so easy as that."

From there, I went to J4's room in another part of the Massive, remembering the task Vix had charged me with before we parted ways. Even if she hadn't asked me, I'd probably have gone, because I did want to see that J4 was okay.

Much as she'd never taken to me (to put it tactfully), I did actually care about her, if only because I saw my face in hers and it sent those chemicals rushing through my brain. Honestly, Zim was probably right: he could sprinkle some of my DNA on a cupcake, and I'd be wanting to snuggle up to that too.

I rapped softly on her door, glancing around in case a stray member of Zim's skeleton crew should happen by. A few seconds later, the doors slid just far enough apart to frame a sliver of J4's face, one red eye peering warily out at me.

"Dib," she said, with less contempt than usual – maybe even a trace of relief. "How you get here? What you doing?"

I had thought she'd be safe, since I figured Zim would have taken the opportunity to brag about tossing her out an airlock. Still, it was good seeing her, knowing for sure. "It's kind of a long story," I said, "but right now, we've got to go. Vix and Gaz are waiting for us. We all want to get you and PI off this ship – make sure you're safe."

She blinked through the crack in the doors. "No."

"What? What do you mean, _no_?"

"No is mean no. Will stay here. Have been here whole time, been safe; Zim doesn't know. Forgot me. Will keep forgetting me, if I stay here."

"Maybe, but what if he doesn't?" I said, confused and frustrated. J4 hadn't let me get to know her well enough to know if this was just the kind of thing she did, but I had hoped she'd be smarter than this. "What if GIR finds you? What if something happens to the Massive? Listen, J4, I know you don't like me, but this isn't about that; other people are worried about you, too."

"Is not because not like you. Is—" She paused, sucking her upper lip into her mouth, thinking. "Is feeling I have, about staying here. Call it—um—institution?"

"Intuition?"

"Intuition! Have intuition. Feeling is right to stay here. Feeling one on our side should be here, when everybody else run away. Don't like run away. Run away too much already, too many homes. This my home now. Won't let Zim throw me away like trash again." Again, she stopped to think, then added, "Is like Commandergaz says. Stay here, and whatever happens—destiny."

I huffed out a short breath. "Well, I can't _make _you do anything, but I—I just—"

"Will call Vix, tell her is not your fault. Will be okay." A small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. One of her arms slid through the space between the doors, and she took my hand and, very briefly, squeezed it. It was, so far as I could recall, the first time she'd ever touched me. "Don't worry, Dib."

She withdrew into her room and the doors clicked shut. There was nothing left to do but go.


	67. Address For the Liberation of Earth

Dest: That would be awesome! FF is weird with links sometimes, though, so if it didn't show up in a review, you could always e-mail it to me at the address on my profile. :)

**66. Address For the Liberation of Earth**

_Vix speaking_

Time was never really something I thought much about. Not time as in having time to do something, time as in the denominations of time: days, hours, minutes, seconds. All of it was arbitrary in space. But for some reason, whenever I looked back on the day we freed the Earth, I always thought of it in terms of a series of times.

That morning, at 8:15 and 12 seconds, we dropped Mom and our crate of stolen goods – the teleporters – off on Earth. She would take my ship, better-equipped to tow large cargo than Effa's, and set them up outside the atmosphere; Effa and I would go to Jupiter, where most of the structures in the colonies still stood, to ensure they were fit to be inhabited.

At 8:38 and 33 seconds, Effa and I arrived on Jupiter, and ran a sweeping scan on the block of containment halls that occupied a quarter of the planet. For the most part, the artificial oxygen generators, gravity adjusters, and transmission hookups were still functional, just abandoned.

After all, the resources of the Empire (the Empire before Zim, anyway) were such that we didn't need to go to the trouble of liquidating our colonies; we usually just left the structures standing, in case we found use for them again. And we wouldn't have been renowned for our advances in technology if it all broke down after eight years of disuse. The few things that weren't working, Effa and I quickly fixed.

At 9:46 and 3 seconds, Effa and I finished our repairs. A second later, Mom paged me on my pak, asking if she was clear to activate the teleporters. I took a deep breath and gave her the go-ahead.

At 9:47 and 54 seconds, from the grid of narrow streets between the containment halls, we watched violet jets of light stream through the sky like rain. They poured in through the roofs of the containment halls, millions at a time, so as to merge the beams in columns of solid light. For maybe thirty seconds, we stood in awe of their spectacular force, the planet-shaking impact of so much sheer living mass traveling so far in so little time.

When the last beams splashed into the buildings, leaving vaporous purple striae streaking across the sky, I thought I could _feel_ the difference. Nothing appeared to have changed, from where we stood in the streets, but I sensed weight and warmth and movement – the collective presence of the human race – thrumming through the buildings' walls.

At 9:49 and 38 seconds, I glanced at Effa. "So what should we do?" I said, breathless with the joy and terror of a plan carried off.

"_We_?" she said. "This was _your_ idea. You decide."

"But I—well, I—"

"What? You've got all of these people here, and you don't have a clue what to do with them?" She snorted. "Figures."

At 10:20 and 51 seconds, Mom showed up, sheened with sweat but grinning. "Looks like we did it, huh?" she said, clapping me on the back. "And guess what else? Right as I was leaving, I saw the Armada closing in. They'll be training their cannons on the Earth now. We pulled it off by the skin of our teeth, babe."

I let out a long, shaking breath, pushing my hands through my hair. "That's great," I said weakly, trying to swallow the fear that stuck in my throat like a smooth stone, "but what am I going to _do_, Mom?

"I never really thought this far. What am I supposed to tell these people? Colonies aren't designed for long-term occupation; we can't stay here indefinitely. Where am I supposed to tell them we're going to go? I mean, _we're _no better off than we were before, and now we – _we_ meaning us and Mum and Dib, meaning a five-person resistance against the whole of the Irken Empire – are personally responsible for the _entire_ human race!"

"You mean _you_ are personally responsible for the entire human race," Effa said. "How many times must I remind you that this was _your _idea?"

Mom smacked her on the back of the head. "Yeah, but we're in it together," she said, and flashed me a conspiratorial smile. "Why don't you simmer down and sit tight for a second, Vix? I've got some news that's going to cheer you right the hell up."

At 10:30 exactly, I stepped out onto the platform at one end of Containment Hall 1 – the same platform where Mum had stood to give her Address for the Assimilation of Earth. This was the only building that had one, and the only building from which an audio and video feed could be broadcast to the others.

Standing there, looking out at the crowd – as the din of frenzied conversation faded to a murmur, and a sea of faces turned one by one towards me – I was keenly aware that every last living human was seeing and hearing everything I did. In high definition, no less.

I hadn't had time to change out of my labor force jumpsuit. I hadn't even had time to comb my hair. I had nothing prepared, just a few vague ideas floating around in my head, and the longer I thought about the billions of people watching me, the more it felt as if firecrackers were going off in my guts.

The last time I'd had to give a speech – on my first day as Director on Earth – I hadn't been any more ready, but at least then my world had been stable. I had been safe, then, with Mum looming invincible behind me; it hadn't really mattered what I said.

Now, I was faced with saying something that could change the course of billions of lives: human lives, Irken lives, and more even than that. Making or breaking everything. It was terrifying, nauseating, and my legs trembled with a powerful urge to give up and run away—but I didn't, because there was one other important difference between today and that day on Earth. Today, I believed more in what I was about to say than I'd ever believed in anything.

At 10:31 and 5 seconds, silence fell completely, and I approached the podium.

"My name is Vix. You probably already know who I am, and—most of you probably hate me. I can understand why. But I wish you would listen to me now, just for a few minutes, and decide how you feel about me after.

"I know that the Irken Empire, under my mum's leadership, did…terrible things to the human race. I've heard about some of them from those who went through them, and experienced others firsthand. The things we did – and I say _we _not to set myself apart from you, but because when the Earth was conquered, the Empire was all I knew – were unforgivable. I can see that now. But I'm asking you to find it in yourselves to look past that, because there's more at stake now than ever – for Irkens and humans alike.

"We are facing a threat greater than any we have faced before, and to lie down and let it happen is to consign both of our races to slow, painful death. You've seen what's happened on Earth during the past month. You know that if you weren't here, you would have been blasted out of existence with your planet ten minutes ago.

"You also know that before the dawn of this new regime, things were starting to get better. I spoke in the Irken court as your advocate, and I was prepared to use the privilege I _had_ to help you rebuild your lives. Under Zim's rule, this will not happen.

"Under Zim's rule, most of you will die here, in this colony, when the food and oxygen run out. Those of you who find ways to escape will be refugees, until the Irken police squadrons hunt you down. We've bought you time by bringing you here, but _time_ is all it is – not a free ticket out of the hell you've been living in. That, we will all have to earn.

"I have just received news that the Tharlian empire is preparing its fleets to do battle with the Armada, in response to Zim's handling of the negotiations that were going on between my mum and the Tharlian emperor at the time she was dethroned. They've sent out a transmission asking for the aid of any and all factions of the anti-Irken resistance. As of Zim's ascension, I count myself a member of that resistance, and I ask you today to take up arms for our cause.

"What we need to win this war is numbers. We need each and every person willing to fight for their freedom to get onboard a Tharlian vessel and show Zim that there's more to commanding an empire than doing whatever the hell you want.

"I'm not asking you to do this as an act of charity; I'm hiring you to do a job, and you will be paid. You help us reinstate my mum as ruler of the Empire, and humanity will be a slave race no longer. All who fight alongside us will live alongside us when we triumph.

"We can never give you back your lives before assimilation. We can't bring your loved ones back from the dead. We can't erase the eight years of suffering we caused you. But we can do great things for you – give you lives with opportunities undreamed of on Earth a decade ago.

"As allies of the Empire, you will live in more comfort and prosperity than you could have on Earth, for longer than you would have on Earth, and without the inequalities and injustices of Earth societies. We can't ask you to forgive us for the wrongs we've done, but we will attempt to make up for them.

"Nothing can change the past. What we _can_ change is the future – but only if we work together."

When I stepped down from the podium, my pulse was racing, my knees so weak I thought they might buckle right there. I wondered if this was how Mum felt every time she gave a speech. If it was, her job was even harder than I'd thought.

Irken audiences were pretty much conditioned to roar and applaud wildly whenever anyone stood at a podium and said anything, but it took the humans longer to decide how they felt about what I'd said. I didn't stick around to find that out. Sweating and short of breath, I scrambled behind the partition that separated the platform from a small, concealed space at the back of the building, where Mom and Effa were waiting.

"That was one hell of a speech, hon," Mom greeted me, slipping her arm around my shoulders and squeezing. "Guess you got that from your mum, huh?"

"Do you think they went for it?" I asked anxiously. "They didn't—uh, I couldn't tell if they—"

"Hey, if they hadn't gone for it, they could've bum rushed you right there. Seeing as no one so much as told you to go fuck yourself, I'd say they're eating that shit up like birthday cake." Mom smiled. "You were amazing up there, Vix. If she'd have been here, Tak would be proud."

"You think so?"

"I know so. But don't take my word for it; you can tell her all about it yourself." She leaned in and kissed me on the forehead, then withdrew her arm, adjusting the collar of her jumpsuit as she headed for the back door. "Sorry to ditch you guys so soon," she said over her shoulder before she left, "but I'm late for a little meeting on Shrith."


	68. Gaz Comes Back

**67. Gaz Comes Back**

_Gaz speaking_

I didn't have to page Mimi to know where I'd find Tak on Shrith. There were patches of naiala all over the planet, but there was only one anglerfish forest.

Vix and Effa had gone in Vix's ship to rendezvous with the Tharlians, so I borrowed Effa's cruiser to get to Shrith. I touched down a few feet from the spot where Tak's ship sat, empty, at the edge of the anglerfish forest.

Looking at it, resting there under the faintly-fluttering pendants of the trees' leaves, blue pinpoints of light reflected in its windshield, I could almost pretend the last twenty-three years hadn't passed. That somewhere down that winding white path, we might still be walking – me a naïve sixteen-year-old, just a few months off Earth, and Tak's head no higher than my waist. Everything still ahead of us.

_You know, they say sex changes everything, _I advised sixteen-year-old me as I started down the path, the branches of the trees dipping, as if in recognition, to brush the glowing bulbs of their leaves along the top of my head. _They're right._

It was deep in the heart of the forest that I found her, a little ways off the path. Welcoming of the queen made beneath their watchful eyes, a cluster of anglerfish trees had woven their trunks into a sort of basket, in which she curled amid the tattered remains of her gown. Mimi, sitting beside her, hopped down to make room for me.

"Hey, Sticky," I said, climbing up into the basket next to her. "How's it going?"

I slid my arm around her shoulders, hugging her close to me. She was as cold as marble, and as hard. At first, she didn't even seem to know I was there. Then, after a few moments, she blinked – as if waking from a dream – and looked at me with surprise in her eyes. "You came back."

It was a huge relief just to hear her voice, wandering and hollow though it was. "Of course I did."

"You shouldn't have."

"What?" Her gaze drifted downwards, and I cupped her chin to lift her eyes to mine. I found them flat, dull, reflecting nothing – like jewels under a layer of dust. "What do you mean, _I shouldn't have_? Why would you say something like that?"

"Because I'm no good to you now. I never will be again." She brushed my hand away, and again, her gaze fell to the forest floor. "I wish you would take Vix and Mimi and just go away—somewhere far from Irken territory. Just cut your losses and run, before the Empire implodes with Zim at the center of it, and leave me here to die when the shrapnel falls. It's all I deserve."

"Sticky, what are you—"

"Don't you understand, child? I have _failed_, irredeemably. Not just you. Not just Vix. The entire Empire, twenty billion people—I gave them all up to Zim."

She pressed her palms to her temples, her chest heaving with a shuddering exhale. "I was foolish enough to believe I was untouchable – that there was nothing he could do to tear me down again. I was a fool, and I let him take everything I had right out of my hands. I let myself and everyone who depends on me down."

"What are you talking about? It wasn't your fault. It was my dumbass brother's fault, you know that. If anything, it was _my_ fault; you told me to keep him out of trouble, and obviously I didn't. How can you blame yourself?"

"I blame myself because I am _responsible!_" she snapped, her voice thick even in its sharpness, her eyes becoming bright with anger – anger at herself, not me. It was like she was about to burst into tears and fly into a rage at the same time, and all of it directed inward.

"I told you that you were responsible for your brother, but that could only mean so much. When I made the choice to step out onto that platform and become the Almighty Tallest, in an Empire without the network as a safety net, I made myself responsible for _everything _that happened under my watch. It was the burden I chose to bear. I was the one the Empire looked to to make sure things like this _didn't _happen, and there were a hundred things I should have done.

"I should have listened to my instincts, and refused to let you save your brother from slavery. I should have eliminated Zim myself, instead of sending someone else. I shouldn't have been stupid enough to preference my own dignity above making sure Dib had the information that could have ended this before it began.

"We had the chance to tell him, there in your house that day, and I wouldn't let you because I was too…what? Embarrassed? Ashamed? That was nothing, compared to the shame I feel now." She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears she would never allow to fall. "I should have _done something_," she whispered fiercely.

"Tak, listen to me. There was nothing anybody could have expected you to do."

For a little while, we sat silently in the basket of the anglerfish trees' branches – Tak cocooned in her own misery, and me snuggled up to her stroking her antennae, trying to think how to unwrap her. The leaves on the trees, hanging low around our heads, seemed to be watching us.

It was comforting to know that Tak had been here with them all this time. Their calming effect was no less powerful than it had been twenty-three years ago, and even though they couldn't solve our problems, they could at least make us feel a little better for the time being.

Although if this was Tak _feeling better_, I winced to think of the state she'd have been in somewhere else.

"I can't believe I lost to him again," she was mumbling. "Perhaps that's been my _destiny _all along – to have my face ground into the dirt by the lowest creature in the Irken Empire. Three times, I've let him get the better of me. Three times he's ruined my life. Don't humans have a saying – three strikes and you're out?"

"Yeah, but we have another saying, too," I said, smiling. "Third time's the charm."

"Ha! You've always got something, don't you, child?" She shook her head. "If you're looking for further proof of my worthlessness," she said bitterly, "why don't you ask the people who used to call themselves my subjects? You saw how quickly—how _easily_ they abandoned me. How they threw me out of my own court. How _unimportant_ I must have been to them—how little good I must have done!"

"What I saw was that they're blind, Tak. Don't blame yourself for it. Help them see." I reached down to take her hand, lying limply at her side, and warm it in mine. "I didn't come back just because I'm crazy about you, you know," I said, rubbing my thumb over the creases in her palm.

"I came back because something big is happening, and we need you with us to carry it off. We're raising an army—a revolution. Me, Vix, the humans, the Tharlians – everyone who knows you're _not_ worthless, and who wants to see you back on the throne. There are billions of people willing to fight for you, if only you'll come with me and lead them."

"I will lead no one."

"But you _could_, if you would—"

"No!" Jerking her hand out of mine, she glared at me with the fury of a wounded animal, searching desperately for a warm burrow to crawl into and die. "_Why_ are you still here? I thought I'd made it clear by now: I am worth _nothing_ to you.

"I have nothing to give you or anyone else. If you want to try to reconquer the Empire, go ahead, but reconquer it for someone who can be the leader it deserves. All I want is to be left alone to meet the end _I_ deserve, and to never see you – you suffering because of me, you having to watch me fail – again."

I raised my eyebrows. "Hold on. Are you _breaking up_ with me?"

"Yes," she said stiffly.

For a moment, I just looked at her, while she refused to look at me. Then, I grabbed her shoulders and shoved her, admittedly ungently, onto her back in the basket, and got on top of her. She didn't struggle – just laid there blinking up at the canopy, hundreds of tiny blue lights glowing in her eyes. I stretched myself out over her, nestling my head into the crook of her neck.

"Do you remember," I murmured, "the last time we were here? The sand beneath us, the lights above…how we walked, and we kissed, and we were both so much like children then. Do you remember me asking you to do something else you didn't want to do, and how I got to say _I told you so_ when it was over?"

"Yes, and you see how that's ended," she muttered.

"But it _hasn't _ended. Not even close." I lifted my head to catch her eyes. "Sticky, I felt the same about you when you were Queen of the Universe as I did when you were queen of an abandoned lemon factory. I still feel that way about you now, and I'm going to feel that way about you once you're back on top again. I'm always going to come back for you, no matter what.

"That said, I'm not going to let you waste away here, because I know you're better than that. Because I _am_ crazy about you, I want you to do what makes you happy – and spending the rest of your life wallowing in shame isn't it."

I climbed off of her and out of the basket, extending a hand to help her down beside me. Reluctantly – and after several seconds' consideration – she accepted it and stepped out of the basket, unsteady on her feet at first. I wondered if she really hadn't gotten up in three weeks.

"What makes you think any of this is going to work?" she asked, frowning at me.

"I don't know. Just trust me, okay?" I leaned in, kissed her, and pulled back grinning. "I have a feeling."

So we walked out of the anglerfish forest, towards the narrow beams of Shrithian sun slanting through the gaps in the trees. Mimi marching behind us, our hands twined between us, the trees' pendants swaying their farewell above us – and everything still ahead of us.


	69. Light Breaking

**68. Light Breaking**

_Tak speaking_

The Tharlian military had established a temporary base on Grakka, one of the planets in their territory. Though I hadn't given it much thought at the time, many of the planets the child and I had once camped on were actually under Tharlian rule. Which made sense, seeing as we'd been purposely avoiding Irken territory, and the only other intergalactic power strong enough to maintain any significant territory was the Tharlian empire.

Not that _significant_ meant _comparable. _Not that they'd ever posed a threat.

Nor would they pose a threat now, when we most needed them to. That was the thought that weighed on my mind as we touched down on Grakka, in the midst of the makeshift airfield where the Tharlian fleet was docked. _It won't work, _I kept thinking darkly, as we strode through the airfield in search of Vix. _They're fools to challenge the Empire, Zim or no Zim. It won't work._

Even as I took stock of the parked fleet – rows upon rows of sleek, shining vessels, some cruiser-sized and others large enough to require a crew, all painted in the Tharlian colors of turquoise and gold – and found it, admittedly, bigger and better-equipped than I'd expected, I didn't have what anyone would call hope. _They'll be taking off into their own coffins. It won't work._

"Mum!" Vix's cry snapped me out of my thoughts, and the next thing I knew she had thrown her arms around me. I was always a little uncomfortable with her hugging me, as if displaying affection that way were something Irkens _did_, but this time was different than the others. This time, I didn't even feel I deserved it. "It's been _ages_! How have you been?"

"Well…" She let me go and backed off, blinking expectantly, a huge smile on her face. Two questions entered my mind: who could possibly smile, at a time like this? And how could I tell her anything about the past three weeks? "Your mother told me you delivered a rather impressive speech," I said instead.

"Well, a speech," she said, the color in her cheeks deepening with poorly-disguised pride. "I don't know if it was impressive."

"If you have humans willing to fight for you, it was. Do you?"

"I do!" she exclaimed, beaming. "A whole bunch of them. We're swinging by Jupiter to outfit some troops for battle after we're done here."

She took a few steps back, glancing over her shoulder at her ship, docked nearby, and a scowling female Irken standing beside it. When she turned back to me, her smile had softened. "And we're not fighting for _me_, Mum," she added. "We're fighting for _you_."

Vix scampered off towards her ship, and her…companion. Before she could slip off somewhere, I took Gaz by the arm, asking, "Who on Irk is that with Vix? And how did you get her here?"

She flashed me a grin. "That's Effa. She used to be an officer on Earth, and she and Vix worked together on the reforms. It's a fairly recent development, but I think she's Vix's…uh…special friend."

"Oh, lovely," I grumbled. "Another conniving nobody to get a taste of human mating rituals and usurp the Empire. It's comforting to know that even if Zim hadn't, someone would have."

"Don't get your antennae in a knot. Effa's not usurping anything. Besides, isn't that part of why we're going to all this trouble? If we overthrow Zim—" she cast me a meaningful glance "—and put you back on the throne, and the Irkens _finally _figure out there's more to being in charge than being tall, you'll never have to worry about anybody's mating rituals again."

"Huh. You know, it must be a beautiful universe you live in, child, in which everything always works out the way you want it to, and truth and justice are as powerful as we who dwell in reality wish they were." I frowned at her.

"Tell me this. Even if, by some miracle, this army you've assembled manages to defeat the Empire, what's to compel them to reinstate_ me_ as its ruler? How does that benefit them? What's stopping the Tharlian emperor from assuming the throne himself, adding its assets to his, and using Zim's hubris and your optimism to wipe out the Irken Empire forever?"

"I believe I can answer that."

Startled by the sudden boom of a deep male voice, I turned to see none other than the Tharlian emperor himself, heading a small train of attendants. I would never have said it to his face like the child had, but _web-footed space cow _was a rather appropriate appellation for any Tharlian, and their emperor was no different.

He stood taller than me (which might've bothered me, had my height meant anything anymore) and he was solid in build, with muscled shoulders and a thick neck. He had a broad snout, short, sharp horns, and translucent folds of tissue between his claws. Iridescent blue scales patterned him from head to serpentine tail, snaking out from beneath his white and gold robes.

"Emperor Unthim," I said, gathering my wits as quickly as I could. "I didn't expect to see you here already."

"Yes, well. This is a momentous journey we're about to embark on, isn't it? I consider it my duty to be with my people every step of the way." He smiled, an odd expression on his taurine face. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person, Tallest Tak."

It seemed he was trying to be kind – or at least diplomatic – but the sound of my old title was like a blade unsheathed; it felt as if he'd stabbed me. "Please don't call me by that title, Emperor," I said quietly. "It belongs to someone else now."

"Perhaps. But that's what we're setting out to remedy, isn't it?" The lines of his snout bloomed outward into ridges above his eyes, like human eyebrows, and they rose as he regarded the child and I. "I overheard you discussing my motives for taking this risk to help you reconquer your empire, and I must admit you raised some smart questions. However, I want to inform you that there is more on my mind than _adding to my assets._

"The Irken empire is an imperialistic power, but Tharlian concerns have traditionally been directed inward. Our interests lie in maintaining peace and stability in the universe, and positive relationships with other ruling bodies.

"We have had our clashes with your people in the past, but during your rule especially, the Irken empire has become a stabilizing force in the universe. For centuries, its cultural, economic, and sociopolitical spheres have depended upon an intelligent, dependable Irken presence, and all three have flourished over the past twenty-two years.

"As Zim's reign has made abundantly clear, to attempt to improve this system would be to destroy not only it, but the rest of the universe along with it. We do not wish to further tip a perfectly-balanced scale. An attempt to – what was it you said? – _wipe out the Irken empire _would throw the universe into chaos, burdening the Tharlian people with responsibilities we are not prepared to assume. We believe that what is good for the Irken empire will be good for the Tharlian empire, and that what is good for the Irken empire is your leadership.

"I confess that I had, at one time, feared that the imperialistic spirit I spoke of was becoming something of a wildfire—consuming all in its path. I had considered taking action to prevent the Irken race from becoming the _only_ race, and all others merely slaves. But I have heard much about the reforms that were being enacted on Earth before it was eliminated, and I am impressed."

At some point, Vix, along with a handful of Tharlians milling about the airfield, had drifted over to hear the emperor speak. When I saw him smile again, I realized he was looking at her. "Your daughter's plans showed compassion and foresight, not to mention a good deal of promise. You are your empire's mind and voice, Tallest Tak, but she is its heart."

"Then reconquer it in her name," I snapped before he could go on speaking to me, torturing me, calling me things I wasn't and dreaming of things that would never be. "And kindly cease referring to it as _my empire_. The Irken Empire isn't _mine_ anymore."

I whirled and stalked off, painfully aware of the way the shreds of my gown hung around my knees, the way my boots made no sound against the packed soil of the airfield. The Tharlians had erected cloth tents in places, where they would rest in between preparations, and I found myself heading for one without thinking about it – just throwing aside a curtain, glancing around the empty tent, and collapsing on a cushion against one sloping cloth wall. Wishing I'd never left the naiala grove.

No one came in after me, and I was glad. Whoever had stuck her head through those curtains would have found herself without it in short order. As they all appeared to know better than to disturb me, I sat there staring at a panel of gold-and-turquoise-striped canvas, praying for the shame and self-hatred churning inside of me to somehow swallow me whole.

Why had I let Gaz bring me here? Why did I think I belonged anywhere where there were other people, sentient creatures who could trust or turn on me (I wasn't sure which would be worse)? The naiala couldn't abandon me, no matter how miserably I failed. I couldn't disappoint them.

I don't know how long I sat alone in that tent, attempting to decompose by sheer force of will, before a shadow materialized outside its curtains. I recognized the child's silhouette. "Look alive, Sticky," she said through the canvas, somewhat less than delicately. "I've got somebody here who wants to see you."

"Send them away," I muttered. "I don't want to be seen."

"Okay, well, you better jump under a blanket or something, because I'm sending her in anyway. Protip: when shopping for an impenetrable Fortress of Solitude, don't pick a canvas tent."

The curtains rustled and parted, and a small shape shuffled into the tent. I blinked a few times, but I wasn't hallucinating: it was Rel. She stood there blinking at the ground, half-hidden in the shadows, half-illuminated by the Grakkan sun filtering through the canvas weave, looking battered, harried, and ashamed.

Just seeing her soured the back of my throat, ugly memories flooding back. The last time I'd sat in my lounger on the bridge, watching the universe crumble around me. That blank, stupefied look that had spread like a virus through the faces of the crew, when they looked at Zim and suddenly forgot the past twenty-two years.

"What are you doing here?" I barked, feeling a dull pleasure when she flinched.

"I—I'm here to—I—" She gulped hard and decided, as was her wont, to get it all out in one desperate burst. "I want toapologizeforhowIactedandfo reverythingthathappenedandI'mherebecauseI'veofficiallydefectedandIwant tobeonyoursideand—helptaketheEmpirebackfromZim !"

I stared at her a moment, as she collected her breath. "I've been laid low enough, Rel," I said bitterly, not even daring to believe her. "Don't you think it's rather in poor taste to come here and mock me like this?"

"Oh, I knew you would say that. I just knew it." Her face crumpled like a sheet of paper balled in my fist.

"I'm not mocking you. I meant everything I said. I regret so much how I behaved on the Massive, I've _been _regretting it all this time—you and Commander Gaz did so much for me, and I was so quick to give you up. I can't even explain why I did it. I just saw—_him_ showing up there, you know, looking like he looked, and it was like my mind just…evaporated. I couldn't—couldn't—"

"So what? So now that you've seen how Zim treats his subjects, you've come crawling back to me? I've heard he fired near all of the Massive's crew. Is that all I am to you? Your second choice? Your last resort?"

"No!" she cried, looking near tears. "He didn't even have time to fire me! I left the Armada the day after you did, I swear! Things hadn't even begun to fall apart when I realized how wrong I'd been. You can check the flight log in the cruiser I took if you don't believe me—I tried for three weeks to find you, I just _couldn't._ I had no idea where you'd gone. It was only when I heard the Tharlians were going to revolt that I came here, because I figured you would, too."

"Listen to me, Rel." I pushed out a short breath, steeling myself against the sincerity in her eyes. I couldn't fall prey to idealism, to sentimentality. Not now. I'd done that once, at the beginning of what I'd called _a new era_, but I promised myself I never would again.

"It doesn't matter. You'd have been better off staying where you were—I wish all of my former subjects would. That way, at least, they won't lose their lives fighting an unwinnable war, and…they won't have to see me like this."

"What do you mean, _unwinnable_? We can take the Empire back, together. I know we can."

"The Irken Empire is the most powerful force in the universe! The Armada is ten times more formidable a fleet than anything in the Tharlians' wildest _dreams_. They have stronger weapons, greater numbers, and more resources than we do." I looked at Rel with something between contempt and pity. How naïve she had to be, to disregard such impossible odds! "_How_ can we win?"

"Well, we've got something the Empire doesn't have." She smiled. "We've got you."

"I am nothing."

"You are _everything,_" she said, with too much passion for a tiny canvas tent in a packed-dirt airfield. "As long as we have you, we have a _reason_ to fight, and that's something Zim and all of his mush-minded subjects don't have. He might have them brainwashed, but that's at all it is. They're not fighting for anything _real._ They don't believe in him like we believe in you."

"But _why_ do you believe in me?" As it so often seemed to, my frustration was building fast. I clutched my temples, then ran my hands slowly over my head, halfway down my antennae before they dropped, almost shaking.

"I'm a failure, Rel. I failed to stop Zim from ruining the Empire, and I can't see how I won't fail to take it back from him. You've seen where I'll lead you. Why follow me?"

"Because _you_ didn't let Zim ruin the Empire. We did."

She took a few steps closer to me, blinking up at me with pain and hope dancing – perhaps dueling – in her eyes. "I was there on the bridge that day, you remember. You stood up for us til the very end. It was us who didn't stand up for you, and if I can own up to that, so can everybody else. They all know it inside, I'm sure they do. They know who they're really loyal to. But they're trapped, and you're the only one who can free them."

Out of nowhere, she dropped to her knees in the dirt, her hands and her head on the ground. "Your people need you now more than ever, my Tallest. Please—find it in yourself to come through for us, even though we didn't come through for you."

It was an odd time to be thinking about it, but I found myself reflecting on how it had taken me so long to get used to hearing everyone call me that – _my Tallest. _At first, it had seemed like a cruel joke. The thought of possessing such a title had no more entered my mind than the thought of transforming into a snoorbeast, so it took me awhile to realize the crew wasn't mocking me when they said it.

When I did, it was just uncomfortable. Suffocating. Every time I heard it, it reminded me of the enormous expectations resting on my shoulders. The way it differed from other titles, like _your highness_ or _your majesty_, felt terrifyingly deliberate.

All of that power isn't _yours_, it said to me. _You_ are theirs. You belong to them. You are beholden to them. And to them, you must be _everything. _

Now, hearing Rel say it, it felt like light breaking through the clouds. Suddenly, there was nothing I wanted more than to belong to her, to the people she represented, and to be their everything. Better than being alone, and being nothing. Better than becoming fertilizer for the naiala grove. Better to _fight_, to reclaim—not what was _mine_, but what had claimed me. To be a better person than my people had been.

I found myself thinking, as I left the tent with Rel, that maybe that had been my unchangeable truth – my essential Tak-ness – all along.


	70. Battle in a Beached Whale

**69. Battle in a Beached Whale**

Of all the places I'd ever pictured myself, this had to be the last on the list. Standing on the bridge of a Tharlian ship, watching via the viewscreen as we advanced on the Armada. Knowing I was about to go to war against my own people, and the one they were calling their Tallest. My every last instinct rebelled against it.

But then again, these circumstances were far from any I'd ever imagined myself acting under. And now, minutes away from launching the volley that could determine the course of the rest of my life – my life, the Irken Empire, the universe itself – I could hardly afford to have doubts.

The vessel I captained was adequate for my purposes, no bigger or more powerful than any of the others in the front line. There was nothing quite like Irken engineering, but Tharlian ships were better than many. Its crew, made up of mostly Tharlians interspersed with other rebels of assorted races, included no one I knew well. We'd thought it best to scatter the important people, such as we were, instead of lumping us all into one easy target, to minimize potential loss.

_Potential. _I turned the word over and over in my mind, as the Armada loomed closer and closer on the viewscreen. Surely it was too optimistic. In a battle like this, loss wasn't _potential_, it was guaranteed; certainly, people would die. Many of them—us.

Even as I took in the sparse ranks of the Armada, the obvious gaps in its defense – Zim would've tried to call up as many reserves as possible, but it was quickly becoming clear to me that he'd alienated more of his forces than he could rally – I didn't take it lightly. Such was the power of the Empire, even as a shell of its former self. The carcass of the Irken Empire still had more meat than most other races in their prime.

I repeated to myself what Rel had said to me on Grakka, again and again until it became a silent mantra. _We've got something the Empire doesn't have. We have a reason to fight. _

When we got close enough to make out the symbol on the hull of the Massive, a fist as hard and cold as stone closed over everything inside of me, squeezing as if to wring the juice from my innards. He had replaced it. For twenty-two years, my insignia had announced the Empire to everyone who dared approach us, and _Zim_ had replaced it.

I suppose I should've been grateful than he'd only restored the old insignia, the generic Irken emblem that had been lasered into the hull before the ship was even assembled. That it wasn't the words ZIM RULES, or his grinning face, or something equally pompous and moronic. But it burned all the same.

That insignia was part of what had made the Empire _mine_ – a bigger part than even I had realized, before I saw it gone – and moreover, it had been the child's gift to me. It was all the reason I needed to fight.

Which was good, because there was no more time for uncertainty. Close enough to make out Zim's insignia meant close enough to fire the first shots, and close enough to be fired on in return. All of a sudden, we had plunged into battle, and the viewscreen filled with the bright beams of laser cannons; bursts of blue (our side) and violet (theirs) shattered the blackness of space.

I was barking orders to the crew, my hands flying over my control panel. The ship swerved and swung through space, dodging incoming blasts and the trajectories of other vessels, rocking when we took an impact to the hull. We fired madly, all of our cannons hot, laying into everything that bore the Irken insignia.

As in any battle, time became immaterial; the rush of combat wiped it from my brain. I never knew, at any given moment, whether we'd been fighting a minute or an hour. I had no idea when it was that we began to gain the upper hand, and I started to see Irken vessels spiraling past the bottom border of the viewscreen—when we began to feel the sway and rattle of a blow weathered less often than the satisfying jolt of a blow struck.

We might have fought five minutes or all day to penetrate the Armada, like ripples of gold and turquoise spreading in a red sea. To watch the retainers fall away from the Massive, one by one, when we shot them down or they turned tail and ran.

I didn't know how long it took us, but we gained ground. They'd cut out a good chunk of our fleet – some Tharlian vessels lagged behind the rest, damaged beyond recovery and struggling to keep from folding completely, and others had taken a hit and fled – but we were in among them now.

A raft of Tharlian ships flooded through the corridors cleared by the Armada's crippled retainers. Sweeps of blue cannonfire cut a swathe through their remaining ranks. All they could do now was swarm around the Massive, frantically protecting the gem in their crown. All we had to do was take it from them.

Or so it seemed. No sooner had we warmed our cannons for our last skirmish before the showdown than the Massive just—withdrew. It was too big to make tight maneuvers quickly, but as fast as I imagined it could, it slipped its defenders and blazed off in the opposite direction, leaving us all to stand there watching it go. Even what was left of the Armada seemed at a loss.

"That vile little coward!" I slammed my fist down on the control panel. "Does he really think he can just _run away_ from me?"

"I don't know _what _he's thinking," one of the crew members said incredulously, as the others scrambled to fend off the regrouping retainers. "He must know we'll come after him. He won't stand a chance."

I shook my head slowly, watching the Massive descend in the direction of a nearby planet. Sresh, I thought it was called. "No. Look." I leaned forward, barely believing my own eyes. Surely no one – not even _Zim_ – could be _that_ stupid. "I think he's bringing it down."

"What? He can't!"

"Of course not, but he's going to try," I said grimly, feeling sure now. "He'll crash the Massive and disappear on Sresh, if he doesn't peel off in a spare cruiser first. He'll never have to face the mess he's made." I turned from my control panel and strode across the bridge, ordering the crew, "Keep the Armada busy up here. Finish them off, if you can. I'm going to deal with Zim myself."

By the time I left the ship in an escape pod, the Massive had already disappeared behind the veil of Sresh's atmosphere. I switched on my boosters and followed as fast as I could. I plummeted through the atmosphere to find my windshield instantly blackened by a huge column of smoke, billowing up from the wreckage of the Massive.

As I darted to circumvent it, a wave of red escape pods shot up through the smoke and zipped off into the sky, not even bothering with me. I figured that'd be Zim's skeleton crew, getting out while they still could.

Which was fine. It would be just he and I.

I neared the planet's surface to see the Massive well and truly crashed, on its side in the middle of an empty plain; Sresh was a desert world, so at least it hadn't done too much damage to anything else. I wondered, though, as I touched down, if the Massive would ever fly again. Its entire right side was crushed against the ground, and smoke was pouring from its engines still. I could only hope it wouldn't go up in flames while I was inside.

And go inside I did, despite the risk. I lasered out a hatch and climbed into an upended corridor, using what had once been the wall as a walkway, the floor and ceiling on my right and left sides. The impact of the crash had dislodged panels, shorted out most of the wiring. None of the doors or hoverdiscs were working, and what few lights were on flickered.

As I made my way to the bridge, I could hear the ship groaning around me, and again I prayed it would give me time to do what I needed to. Even if it didn't catch fire, the Massive grounded was like a beached whale – soon enough, it would collapse under its own weight.

The doors to the bridge were crumpled – easy to kick them in and slip inside. There, I found several things: the concave wall of the bridge beneath my feet, making me slide as I tried to stand. The viewscreen slipped from its moorings, shattered. The platform lying overturned on one side of the room. And the single most horrible thing I had ever had the misfortune to see.

Zim.

"Tak!" he spat when he saw me, sounding simultaneously surprised and disgusted. "What are you doing here? I thought I told you never to show your ugly face on my ship again!"

I snorted. "You must be really stupid, Zim, if you actually believed you could crash _my_ ship and get away with it. Why don't you give yourself up? You're finished." I came toward him, keeping my stride steady on the curving surface. "My forces have overpowered the Armada. Your own crew has fled the Massive. Your little charade was amusing for awhile, but playtime is over now."

"Lies! I am far from finished, Tak. This is all just part of my plan." His eyes darted nervously from side to side. "You'll see. They'll all see! I'm the best thing that's ever happened to the Empire, and if they can't appreciate that then—then—then they're all fools! Foolish FOOLS!"

"You're the fool. You know nothing of the Empire, or what it means to command it." Advancing on him, I stepped on a plate of glass come loose from a broken console, and heard it _crunch_ under my boot. "You will die for what you've done to our people, Zim. I can promise you that."

He'd taken a few steps back, but he stopped then, sneering at me. "You're just jealous of me. You can say whatever you want – _I'm_ still the Almighty Tallest, and _you're_ not."

That was it. I couldn't stand another second of this. A silver rain of cables burst from my pak, flying towards him; a second before I felt the flesh of his throat twist in my grip, he ducked, swearing, and struck back with his pak-mounted laser. I deflected his blasts and went after him again, extending my pak's limbs, chasing him halfway up the ceiling-turned-wall.

"You have no right to call yourself the Tallest!" I shouted as I took a swipe with the sharp edge of a limb, missing him by a millimeter. "You never shed a drop of sweat for that title, save whatever filthy fluids you discharged copulating with that _repulsive _Earth monster! You never had to suffer for it!

"You were glad to waltz right into the position _I_ created for you, but you have no _idea_ what it was like before! I revolutionized the entire Empire so that I could call myself Almighty without lying through my teeth, and you act as if you're _entitled_ to it!"

We traded blows all through the rubble on the bridge, swooping, whirling, vaulting, dodging. Filling the air with the _clang_ of metal against metal, the smell of smoke as streams of laser-fire honeycombed the walls. Me screaming at him with every strike, and between them.

"Nothing is ever hard for you, is it?! You're too brain-dead to know what _hard_ is! I'll bet you didn't even _notice_ you were growing, until one day you turned around and smacked your head on a doorway!"

Finally, I got my pak's limbs hooked into his jacket, grabbed him and pinned him to the wall. He snarled, unsheathing his pak's weaponry, but in the same second I jerked him up and smashed him back against the wall. His head hit and bounced back, his eyes rolling in their sockets, and a pile of snapped-off metal limbs clattered to my feet.

"You've humiliated me for the last time," I hissed into his face.

Then – out of absolutely nowhere – I felt _something, _some hollow metal weight, come careening into the back of my head, knocking me off balance. I went suddenly blind, and it took me a moment to realize that there were small hands clapped over my eyes.

"GUESS WHO!" a horrid voice squealed from above me, but I didn't have to.

I stumbled backwards, clawing at the SIR unit, losing my hold on Zim. Through the darkness and the din of the SIR's shrill laughter, I heard the sound of a laser firing, and a hot, sharp pain exploded in my side. It stole my strength and I fell, hard, onto the concave surface beneath me. When Zim's SIR leapt off of me, when my vision returned, it was too late. I blinked up, dazed, to see Zim standing over me. Smirking.

He drew his lasers, and for a second there was nothing but to anticipate the endless night of death.

Or—or a wave of formless force, suddenly sweeping the bridge. Flattening Zim, along with whatever threat he posed, like a palm tree in a hurricane. We were both sprawled on the floor now, gaping up at a chimera's silhouette: a willow-thin, red-clad figure below, and a SIR unit with pointed ears and pink eyes above. My mind was fuzzy with pain, but I remembered them. Gaz's hybrid charity case, and her little guide pig.

Zim laid still, groaning, perhaps more stunned by the pink SIR's attack than I was by his. The Tharlian power core's energy, so channeled, wouldn't leave a mark, but it packed a bigger punch than many weapons that did. The girl approached him and crouched down, looking into his eyes.

"I am not an embarrassment," she said to him. "And I am not a monster. But I am the worst _mistake_ you ever made."

"GIR!" Zim croaked, trying to scramble away from the girl. "Defend your master! Do that thing—the thing you did last time! Make it stop!"

Zim's SIR unit wandered over and blinked up at the one on the girl's head. "PIGI!" it shrieked, throwing its arms in the air. "Let's play!"

The SIR and the girl exchanged a glance, one looking down, the other up. Then, it climbed down off of her shoulders, faced Zim's SIR, and said, "No thanks, GIR. Maybe later."

"But—but—tacos!"

"Sorry." The pink-eyed SIR reached up and removed the helmet from its head, its cables retracting with a gentle _shlick_. "Some things are more important than tacos."

Zim's SIR stared at it for a few seconds, wide-eyed. Again, it began to laugh, but this time with the corners of its mouth turned down; it backed away from the pink-eyed SIR unit laughing hysterically, as if terrified. As if it had suffered a complete break with reality, and gone totally insane—if that was even possible, given its normal state.

"You're crazy!" it screeched, its head whipping around in search of an escape. "Crazy! FISH STICKS!"

With that, it fired up its jets and took off right through the wall of the bridge, punching a hole through fifteen layers of triple-reinforced steel designed to withstand a whole fleet's supply of cannonfire. As if it were styrofoam. Had that day been shaping up to be any less surreal, it might have occurred to me to be surprised.

But I had bigger things on my mind. I took stock of the scene: Zim babbling confusedly on the floor, incapacitated, and the girl and her SIR unit smiling at each other, enjoying what I'm sure was a meaningful moment with absolutely no meaning to me. Slowly grasping the dizzying fact that the tide had turned, perhaps decisively, in my favor, my mind jumped to the next step I would have to take. Despite the throbbing in my side, the wet dark stain spreading through the tatters of my gown, I fumbled for a wall to steady me as I stood.

"Tallesttak!" the girl cried when she saw me try to get up, rushing over with the SIR to take me by the arm. "Shouldn't get up. Look—bleeding." She touched her fingertips to the growing stain, and they came away dark blue. "Sit down. Will help you."

"Don't bother with me." I jerked my chin at Zim. "I'll be fine, so long as you keep your eyes on him."

The girl and the SIR looked at each other uneasily, hesitating. "What are you waiting for?" I snapped, albeit a little weakly. "Go! Take him into custody! Every second he's free creates exponential possibilities for doom!"

As they hurried off to apprehend Zim, I sighed and sat down again, acknowledging that to rise as I was might create quite a bit of personal doom. Still, there was work to be done. I began by paging the child on my pak.

"Bring the Armada down," I told her. "It's over."


	71. Aftermath

Just two more chapters left after this one!

**70. Aftermath**

I'd addressed my people on many occasions since that first time at the Presentation tower. Sometimes, via mass transmission, all at once; other times, in smaller assemblies. At podiums, on platforms, from heights great and low. In times of prosperity and turmoil. Accompanied, by Gaz or Vix or Mimi, by any number of attendants and advisors massed behind me, and alone. On near-all, if not all, of the worlds to which the Irken Empire laid claim.

But never once like this. Never on an undeveloped planet in Tharlian territory, standing on the hull of my crashed flagship. The smoke, by then, had dissipated, and I could see that the crowd before me was by far the smallest I'd ever spoken to – the sum of the Armada, by far smaller than it had ever been.

Just a handful of dazed-looking pilots and their crews, climbing out of a cluster of battered vessels hemmed in by the docked Tharlian fleet, escorted by armed rebel soldiers. They stumbled across the sand blinking up at my silhouette, sharp against the Sreshian sun.

I wasn't alone, if one counted the veritable circus in the shadows on the other side of the Massive. There was Gaz, of course, and Mimi, and Vix; Rel; the Tharlian emperor and his retinue; Dib and his hybrid issue, plus the pig-eared SIR unit (which without its helmet was, in fact, pig-eared no longer); Zim, cuffed and fitted with a deactivator disc, on the ground between a pair of hulking Tharlian guards.

But I _was _the only one who stood atop the hull of the Massive, looking out over the gleaming blue-and-gold of the Tharlian ships, the desert stretching into the horizon beyond them, the vast pink sky. And my people at the center of it all – waiting, as on the day of my Presentation, for me.

_We'll just get in the way, _the child had assured me, as she'd waved me up to give this little sermon on the mount. _Let them see only you._

So there I stood, bruised and exhausted, my gown in ribbons, the wound in my side stoppered for the moment by a hastily-wrapped bandage (actually a swathe of fabric torn from the hem of the child's dress). To be honest, I wasn't much to see. But there I stood regardless, and my people expected me to speak. To say something…important.

And I'd figured if I was going to say something important, I might as well say it to as many people as possible. Thus, when I began to speak, I spoke not only to the small collection of Irkens gathered on the Sreshian sand, but to the little transmitter salvaged from the Massive and set up a few feet in front of me on the hull. If I managed to say anything worth listening to, every head in Irken territory would turn to hear it.

_So, you know, _Gaz had said with a grin, socking me gently in the shoulder, _no pressure._

"Twenty-two years ago," I began, "I stood before you and asked you to reconsider a large part of your collective way of life, in order to liberate the Irken Empire from itself. To tear down a system put in place to protect you, but also to subjugate you – to make your decisions for you, and remove your own destinies from your hands. Now, I'm asking you to do it again.

"Our Empire lies in ruins not because of any one person – not because of me, or Zim, or any of you – but because of the greatest fallacy of our culture, nurtured for far too long in all of our minds.

"Someone once told me that height is like a jewel: a rock to which an arbitrary value is assigned. The idea that any physical characteristic makes one person better or worse than another is a myth. No one should be given any privilege or responsibility, much less the_ degree_ of privilege and responsibility ruling an empire entails, because they are taller than someone else.

"I won't attempt to explain it now, but there is a _reason _some among us grow to this height. A perfectly natural, rational reason. Irkens like Zim and I were not chosen by a higher power. We are not gods. We are ordinary people who stumbled into extraordinary circumstances, and we are no different now than we were when we looked like the rest of you. Our Empire lies in ruins because _he_ is the same person he was before he became your Tallest, but our power structure fails to recognize that.

"You believe you are helpless to change this. That, too, is a myth. The only thing that impels you to serve the Almighty Tallest is cultural conditioning. It is not a biological compulsion – it is a will, and it can be broken. I've seen it happen with my own eyes.

"For thousands of years, we as a race have been told that we cannot know on our own to whom our loyalty belongs, but this is untrue. All that prevents us from thinking independently is a society telling us we can't.

"I stand before you today asking you to allow me the honor of being your leader, but not because I'm _tall. _I want to know that my people trust me to make the choices and shoulder the responsibilities that will restore and perpetuate our Empire's greatness, even knowing that I am exactly the same person who once pushed a mop on planet Dirt.

"I want to rule knowing that I won't be dethroned unless I fail to reward your loyalty. That when I'm gone, someone strong and smart and passionate will be appointed to carry on my legacy – not just someone who looks the part.

"Above all, I want my people to be free. You are free to decide whether or not I deserve to call myself your Tallest again. All I ask is that you make that decision based not on the body I inhabit, but on the person I am."

One never quite knows when a speech will end, if it's not prepared ahead of time. I just sort of spoke until I felt I'd said all there was to say, and then I breathed deeply and fell silent. Waited.

It would be impossible to describe how I felt, when I heard the first stirrings of applause in my small audience. When they began to cheer, and shout (and somebody in the back yelled "TALLEST TAK ROCKS!"), and I knew without asking what it meant. It was as if the weight I'd been carrying for the past month – perhaps the past twenty-two years – had suddenly evaporated, leaving me lighter than air.

It was as if all of those ribbons that bound me had unraveled, and I felt the breathless joy of discovering myself intact—or more than just intact, _better_. Not perfect, but better, better for all of it. Like a limb cut out of a cast.

When I felt myself growing dizzy from the roar of the crowd (or perhaps it was just standing so long, in the heat of the sun, with my makeshift bandage quickly darkening), I turned and crossed the hull of the Massive, sliding down to the ground on the other side.

Vix was squealing and clapping, looking like she'd have thrown herself at me and hugged me if she weren't afraid I'd break in two. Gaz, smiling, reached out to touch my shoulder. But letting them throw me a victory party was the last item on my list.

"You!" I barked at a random Tharlian soldier, satisfied to see him snap to attention. "Contact the Massive's maintenance and repair team. I want an estimate on restoration time in two hours. You—" I jabbed my finger at another soldier "—regroup as much of the Armada as still exists, and see that repairs begin immediately. You—" this time I indicated Rel, who looked positively delighted to have me issuing her orders again "—take stock of my councils. Schedule a conference, to take place as soon as possible.

"And _you_." I turned to Zim, on his knees flanked by his guards. I'd taken the liberty of taping his mouth shut, so he couldn't start shouting about the doom he planned to visit on me, but his eyes were slit in a glare. "It's past time I dealt with you.

"Were you anyone else, I might at least afford you the formality of a trial, but that's hardly necessary here. Your crimes are too numerous and too self-evident to merit examination. I promised you that you would die for what you did to the Empire, and I'm going to fulfill that promise. Right here. Right now."

The Tharlians and other rebels surrounding us began to disperse, sensing the solemnity of the occasion. I snorted under my breath at this diplomacy Zim didn't deserve.

In fact, I almost called _where are you going? We need no privacy here. Stay, watch, invite your friends; pop popcorn if you'd like. I'll provide the butter. If you stick around a bit, we'll stuff his carcass with candy and make a piñata. _

I didn't, though, because not all among those who remained looked as cavalier as I felt. Gaz, naturally, was on my side, and Mimi had no objections. Dib looked nauseous, but of course he _would_, and of course I didn't much care; he was lucky I wasn't having him executed as Zim's accomplice. But Vix seemed a bit disturbed (as _she_ would, being – what was that word the Tharlian emperor had used, the nice word for 'weak'? – oh yes, _compassionate_), so for her sake, I let the crowd drift away.

"The only question," I said silkily (unable, even for Vix, to resist the urge to gloat a short while), "is how. There are, as you surely know, no do-overs when it comes to this sort of thing, so I mustn't waste this opportunity while I've got it. Wouldn't want any regrets.

"So shall I deactivate your pak, and enjoy watching you watch your lifeclock tick down to nothing? Shall I have you boiled, or beaten to death, or skinned alive? Shall I have you ground up into hotdog meat, and served up on trays by your old coworkers at Shloogorgh's?

"Or shall we do this the old-fashioned way – the _human_ way – and have you bent over a chopping block and beheaded?" I sighed, my lips spreading lazily into a smile. "It all sounds so appealing. How will I ever decide?"

To Zim's credit (not that I ever wanted to give Zim credit for anything), he displayed more dignity then than I'd thought him capable of. He didn't struggle, or hurl muffled curses at me through the tape. He just knelt there glowering up at me, looking contemptuous and utterly unafraid. I supposed that the reality of death was beyond Zim – that he was too stupidly self-confident to conceive of his own end. Like a child, he believed he was immortal.

And perhaps he was. That, or there _was _in fact a higher power who liked him, because just as I'd drawn my laser to liberate his head from his shoulders, I felt a hand on my arm. "Don't."

I turned to see the pale-skinned hybrid girl beside me, determination gleaming in her red eyes. "What?"

"Don't kill him," she said softly, attracting a barrage of astounded glances. Even Zim looked surprised for a moment, before he shook it off and resumed scowling. "Banish him. Send him away. Will never see him again, will be the same—just don't kill him."

It was too ridiculous. I had to laugh. "You must be joking."

"Not joking."

"Well, why on Irk not? If what I know of your history is correct, you have as much reason to want this vile creature dead as I do. Either you are making a very poorly-conceived joke, or you have been spontaneously infested with brain worms. Whichever it is, Zim will die regardless, and we will all be better off for it."

"Not joking. Not crazy. Don't like Zim any more than you do, but—is other reason. Not important." She looked at me meaningfully. "Is arsenal favor."

I frowned. "You mean a personal favor?"

"Yes, personal favor. Do because I ask you."

"And what reason do I have to do _you_ a personal favor?" I snapped, growing increasingly impatient with the conversation. All around us, the others held a collective breath, looking as if they were watching a tennis match – eyes jumping from me to the girl and back to me, following the ball from my side of the court to hers. That ball, I suppose, being Zim's wretched little life.

"You owe me," she said. "Would be dead, if it weren't for me. We saved your life, me and PI. Saved whole Empire. Is not worth small favor?"

"It's far from a _small _favor," I muttered. "And if anything, it's owed to that SIR unit. Better yet, the Tharlian empire – it's their power core inside it."

But one look told me very clearly that I would find nothing but support for the girl's wishes in the SIR's round pink eyes. And I knew without asking that the Tharlian emperor, fond as he was of _compassion_, wouldn't exactly be on my side.

"Could ask for much more, Tallesttak," said the girl. "Could say you owe me many lives – every life the Empire would've lost, if you lost yours. But I want just one thing, one favor to make us even. One life, exchange for yours." She nodded at Zim. "His."

"You should _know_," I spat, "if you know anything, that you can't compare his life to any other. Generations of Tallests before me have brought chaos on the Empire by allowing him to keep it. And you're asking me to—to—"

The words broke off in a strangled growl. The girl was right, of course she was right – I could never call myself a person of principles if I refused to repay the debt I owed her – but for her to ask _this_, of all things! It was inconceivable! "_Why?_" I said desperately. "If you _must _endanger the Empire and rob me of my revenge—waste a blank check with my signature saving the life of a fool who's treated you like dirt—don't I at least deserve to know _why_?"

"Told you, not important. Will not make you happy. Will not change my mind."

As I seethed, half-wishing the girl had just let Zim kill me – _better to die, even by his hand, _I thought bitterly, _than to have him right where I want him, _finally_, and have to let him go _– the child came to my side, and looked at me knowingly.

"Irken code of honor, Sticky," she reminded me, touching my shoulder. "An eye for an eye. A life for a life."

"You can't possibly approve of this," I hissed at her.

"I don't. I think she's fucking crazy. But you owe her, and it's what she wants."

"_Fine._" I jerked back around to face the girl, answering her hopeful expression with a glare. "I will spare Zim's life," I snarled, "and our score will be settled. I hope you are aware, stupid mongrel, that you have thrown away the best opportunity you'll ever get, and he will not be grateful for it."

I whirled and strode away from the scene, unwilling to stay to hear Zim brag about how he had triumphed. To so much as look at him for even a second after I rendered my judgment, and see the smug satisfaction in his eyes. "Arrange a vessel to remove the exile from Irken territory," I snapped at a Tharlian soldier as I left. "Preferably so far away it'll take him twenty years to get close enough to cause me more trouble."

When the Sreshian sun set, painting the sky the same color as the blood drying on my bandage, the child and I retired to our suite in the Tharlian flagship. Emperor Unthim was allowing us the use of it until the Massive was restored, as we had nowhere else to go, and as I wasn't in much condition to be going anywhere anyway.

That night, I lay on the bed with my gown unzipped and my wound unwrapped, Gaz sitting beside me wielding the handheld component of a laser-therapy machine. For a long while, I closed my eyes as she ran it slowly over the several inches of flesh torn open by Zim's laser, feeling my skin start to itch as it knit under the healing beam.

"There." When she was done, she switched off the machine and brushed her fingers over the spot where the wound had been, now bruised and a bit tender but otherwise neatly mended. "How's that? Better?"

"Yes, yes," I said as I sat up, having had my fill of being treated like an invalid. "I'm fine."

"Uh-huh. How about I grab you a hot compress, just for kicks?"

"I don't need that. I told you, I'm _fine_." Ignoring my protests, she prepared a hot compress and pressed it against my side, wrapping a clean bandage around my waist to hold it in place. She handed me my nightdress (or _a _nightdress, anyway) and I pulled it over my head, slipping out of the lower half of my gown.

"So does this mean you're not going to attempt to molest me tonight?" I grumbled as she climbed back onto the bed next to me, snuggling up to the side that wasn't sore.

"Are you disappointed?" she asked, grinning.

"Actually, I'm relieved. I'm embarrassed enough to have to accept the emperor's charity; I won't have you abusing his hospitality."

"_Abuse_? Sticky, if he had any sense, he'd consider it a compliment." She sighed. "It's really too bad, too. If there were any night to celebrate, it'd be tonight."

"What's there to celebrate?" I said glumly. "That foolish little hybrid ruined my victory in one blow. If I can't take any measures against Zim more effective than those that have already failed to stop him twice, I have accomplished nothing."

"Don't waste your energy being pissed at J4. What's done is done." As she always did to calm me down when I was upset over something, she began stroking my antennae. And as always, it frustrated me – wasn't I entitled to feel whichever feelings I wanted, to whatever degree I wanted, without her manipulating my body's hardwiring to change them? – but it felt good, and I couldn't bring myself to push her away.

"Besides," she added, "it might be a good thing."

"How on Irk is Zim's being free to wreak havoc on the universe a _good _thing?"

"Well, he makes our lives interesting." I frowned at her, and she hooked one finger through the spiral of my left antenna, tugging gently. "No, really," she said, one corner of her mouth hitched in a half-smile. "Think about it. Zim and his stupidity are responsible for just about everything good that's happened to you, right? Indirectly, sure, but responsible still.

"If he had never sabotaged you on Devastis, you never would've had to come up with the snack plan. If he'd never ruined the snack plan, you never would've hooked up with me. If you'd never hooked up with me, there would be no frickin' point in living – oh, and you wouldn't be the Almighty Tallest, either.

"And if he'd never challenged you, you'd have lived your whole life never knowing if we could whoop his ass like we did. Never sure if your people were truly loyal to you, or if they'd drop you in a hot second if someone taller came along. No matter how great you were, in the end you'd have been just one in a string of beanpoles shoved onto the throne because they looked good on it.

"But because of Zim, things are going to change. For the better. And for good."

She cradled my face in her hands and kissed me – a long, slow, sweet kiss, her thumb stroking my cheek, a lock of her hair brushing my face. When it ended, she pulled back just an inch, smiling at me, and her coins-of-amber eyes (combined with the taste of her still in my mouth, sour candy and soda fizz) made a lump rise in my throat.

"Who knows what awesome things might not have happened in a few years," she whispered, "if you'd killed him today?"

I let out my breath and rested my head on her shoulder, my eyelids falling shut. _Maybe she's right, _I allowed myself to think. _Maybe it's okay. _"The compress feels nice," I mumbled after a moment.

Which was true. The longer I sat there nestled against her, with her fingers tracing lazy paths up and down my left antenna, the more the warmth from the compress spread throughout my body, dulling the residual soreness in my side. My breaths grew longer, deeper, and the last thought I remember having before I drifted into sleep was that this was enough of a celebration for me.

Sexual pleasure was…lovely, yes. But surely this different pleasure – the pleasure of falling asleep completely unburdened, curled up with someone who knows how to make every bad thing seem better – was all anyone could ask for.


	72. Dib's Loose Ends

Dest: That's awesome, I'd love to see it. I have to say I'm not sure what you mean by 'confusing words/grammar', as I proofread all my chapters before posting them. As an English major, I do take a fair bit of pride in the technical clarity of my work. If you don't mind, could you give me an example of where you think I'm messing up?

**71. Dib's Loose Ends**

_Dib speaking_

When the whole scene in the shadow of the Massive was over – when Tak had stalked off to wherever to do whatever, and Zim had been led away by the Tharlian guards, smirking under the strip of tape someone had slapped over his mouth – I turned to ask J4 what the hell she'd been thinking, and what do you know, she was gone.

After a second spent glancing around, scratching my head, I noticed one trail of footprints in the sand that led in a different direction than everyone else's. Little footprints. She had tiny feet.

Is that what guys think about when they think about their kids? Weird things, like tiny feet? I mean, they must, because otherwise nobody would bronze baby shoes, or frame baby footprints—right? But maybe that's only normal when the kid is still, you know, actually a baby.

Maybe it's weird that I followed that trail until it ended, at a low ridge of rocks a short ways out in the Sreshian desert, thinking the whole time about her little feet. Thinking that if her feet were this small now, they must have been really tiny when she was a baby, and wondering if I'd missed out on something by not having any framed footprints.

I found myself doing that a lot, when I spent time with J4. Thinking about what I'd missed.

She was strolling happily back and forth on the ridge, hopping from rock to rock, chattering to PI. When they saw me, they both fell silent. "Hey," I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.

J4 nodded. "Hi."

We stared at each other for a minute – her looking down at me from the top of a jagged boulder, both of her little feet balanced on its blunt point, and me blinking up at her silhouette against the sun. When she leapt off that rock onto another one, her long hair swinging and catching the light, I figured it was about time I said what I wanted to say.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

She glanced backwards at me, cocking her antennae playfully. "Can't stay on one rock forever. Humans say—gather moss?"

"You know that's not what I meant. Why did you stand up for Zim?"

I watched her jump onto the next rock in the string, then the next, with her arms spread out at her sides for balance. "Tak _owed _you, J4. Do you even understand what that means? You could've had anything in the whole universe, anything at all. You could've saved that favor for a time you might really need it. And she was right; Zim's not going to appreciate it."

"Didn't do it to be appreciated. Didn't do it for Zim." She paused before her next leap. "Did it for you."

Well, _that _was the last thing I'd expected to hear. "What?"

"You like him. Don't know why, but you do. You are…how say nicely…not good hiding it." Again, she turned to look at me, a knowing glint in her eyes. "Can see when you look at him. Can see in your face when Tallesttak say he will die. You don't want him to die, but can't do anything to stop her. So I stop her for you."

"But _why_?" I couldn't believe it. What she'd said was true, truer than anything – what the hell would I have _done_ if Tak had killed Zim? What would have been left for me? It was pathetic, but in an infinite universe, he was the only reason I had found to get out of bed every day.

But after seven years of J4 treating me like a leper (that is, treating me how most people on Earth had treated me), I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea of her wanting to do _anything_ for me, much less something so…well, so big. "I thought you hated me!"

She sighed and plopped herself down on a low, flat boulder, patting the space beside her. I took the hint and sat down. "Want to explain," she said slowly. "Maybe…should have explained long time ago, but—not ready then. Ready now.

"Is not your fault, what happened to me. You didn't know. Couldn't know. Never blamed you for that. And—is not fair not like you because you are human. Vix is right. Not all humans the same. You try to be…more than _isha_ to me, even though I wouldn't give you a chance. Keep trying, all this time. You come to get me on the Massive, when Commandergaz and Tallesttak didn't."

She glanced up at me from the corners of her eyes, her antennae drooping like a sad dog's ears. "Is another reason for hate you," she added quietly.

"Oh, great. And what would that be?"

Before she spoke again, she drew and released a deep breath, and her eyes swiveled back down to the sand between her feet. "Hate you since found out is your fault I exist. If not for you ruin Zim's clone, would not be alive, and—for a long time, think would be better that way. Better if not exist.

"If living is only for get hurt, be lonely, angry, walk in clouds—if living is only bad things, and after bad things feel sad about bad things, what's point? Waste long time on bitter. Waste long time on sad. Is feeling like—having funeral? Dawn?"

"You mean mourning?"

"Yes, mourning. For a long time. Mourning things lost, things never had—feeling things better now not enough for make life worth living. Feeling will never be happy enough to erase the sad. Hate you for make me live, if this is life."

She chanced a look at me, her antennae pricking before the corners of her mouth. "But is get better, always. Every day. Every time drink _feeya_, play game with PI, talk to Vix. Every time see reason for live, like…give advice to Vix, save Tallesttak. Every time make difference, every time feel good, is feeling a little more like forgive you. Maybe even thank you, someday. When sure is good to be alive."

She climbed to her feet again and hopped onto the next rock, swaying a little before she steadied herself. "Tallesttak can't give me what I want. Can't make bad things not happened. Can't change the past. And I don't want anything else, so next best thing is give you what you want, because…feeling like want you to be happy."

It was a lot to process, and I'd have been lying if I said it didn't put a lump in my throat. I could have argued with her, I guess. I could have said that if she wasn't going to blame me for East End, she couldn't blame me for creating her, since I hadn't meant for that to happen, either. I could've said it was the same thing: I didn't know, _couldn't _know.

But I was consumed, listening to her speak, with the least self-centered regret I'd ever felt in my life – with this _longing_, this fierce, unquenchable longing to have been able to protect her. To have been there when she was born, and held her, and seen her eyes open for the first time. To have had the chance to be a father whose daughter didn't hate him for inflicting life on her.

And it was weird, but as I sat there, watching her with what felt like a set of those wind-up chattering teeth gnawing at my heart, that I finally felt like a father. Not that I had any reason to know how a father feels. It was just one of those things you know when you know.

"Well, um—it was a nice thing to do," I said, my voice emerging a little bit hoarse at first.

"Yes," she agreed. "Was nice thing."

"So, you know. Thanks."

"You are welcome."

"And I—uh—well. I'm sorry."

When I said that, she turned to face me, fixing me with a strange look. "You know," she said, "there was other person said sorry to me once. I killed her."

My eyes must have bugged out, because her expression changed and she laughed, whirling back around to bound onto a big rock. "Point is, don't be sorry. Like I said—can't change the past." She smiled at me over her shoulder. "Can only hope the future will be better."

I got up off the boulder, feeling that for now, we'd said all there was to say. I didn't know if it was the conversation or the heat of the Sreshian sun, slicking the back of my neck with sweat, but standing up, I felt suddenly lightheaded. "Zim is leaving," J4 said, before I could think of what to say to her. "You are going with him?"

"Um—yeah. I guess I am." I mean, realistically – what else was I going to do? What else did I _want_ to do?

"He is exile. Means not coming back?"

"Oh, I'm sure we'll both be back eventually. No one can keep Zim out of trouble for long, though I'll do my best to…uh…distract him."

"Okay," she said, nodding. "Don't know where I will be then. Not wanting gather moss, you know? Maybe leave the Armada for awhile, go somewhere with PI. See the universe. But when you come back," she added, "look up at me."

I figured she probably meant _look me up_, but I wasn't about to ruin the moment – or the closest thing to a 'moment' we'd probably ever have – by correcting her. "I will."

So I walked away from the ridge, heading back across the desert to where the Massive's carcass lay, an only slightly different person than I'd been walking over to it. It wasn't, after all, like we'd hugged, or cried, or made big sappy declarations of love. I wasn't going to be coaching J4's soccer team or packing her peanut-butter sandwiches; I would never have her framed footprints on my wall. I wasn't even sure we'd ever have a not-awkward conversation.

But the small way in which we'd both changed, just now talking on the ridge, cast what we _did_ have in a whole new light. Maybe I couldn't get back all of the things I'd missed, and maybe she couldn't yet forgive me for bringing her into a cruel world. But we could both, as she said, hope the future would be better.

After I left J4, I had a Tharlian soldier show me to Zim, hoping I'd catch him before they kicked him off Sresh and out of Irken territory. Sure enough, I found him being shoved into a cruiser a little ways from the rebel fleet and what remained of the Armada, barking indignantly at the Tharlian guards who were deactivating his laser-cuffs. He shut up, though, when he saw me.

"Can we get a minute?" I said to the guards. They exchanged a glance, nodded, and trooped off, stationing themselves a short distance away – out of earshot, but close enough to shoot warning glares at Zim.

"Earth slime," he sniffed to acknowledge me, folding his arms and leaning against the wall of the cruiser.

Not his old cruiser, I noted, which would definitely have been too small for him now. It appeared to be one the Tharlians had assigned him, I guessed so they wouldn't have to wait for the Irkens to get their shit together to get him the hell out of here. "What do you want?" he demanded.

"Well," I said, thinking it wouldn't help to beat around the bush, "I figured that wherever you're going, I'd come with you."

He couldn't hide the relief that darted over his face, but that didn't stop him from trying. "You mean you figured you'd request the honor of attending me," he said snidely, "though you understand how thoroughly beneath me you are, and that I would, were I in my right mind, most certainly refuse?"

"I _mean_, since you're being kicked out of the Empire and even GIR's apparently flown the coop on you, I thought I might offer you the pleasure of my company."

"The pleasure," he repeated, musing. "Yes." He glanced down, then back up at me, looking suspicious – not quite dropping his guard, but at least peering out from over it. "Why?"

"Oh, you know." I shrugged. "I've got some obligations to fulfill."

He considered that and summarily brightened, looking so pleased I had to swallow a snort of laughter. "That was actually clever, Dib-monster," he said as the corners of his mouth curled into a grin. "I didn't know you could be clever."

"I bet there were a lot of things you didn't know I could do."

"Indeed." He paused, furrowing his brow momentarily. "You did mean—"

"Yes, Zim. That's what I meant."

"Good. Just checking."

For a few seconds, he just looked at me thoughtfully, as if I were a puzzle he was trying to decide how to solve. Then, he reached out, took my face in his hands, and kissed me, there in the bald light of the Sreshian desert. In full view of the guards and anyone else who might've happened by, any of the Tharlian and Irken ships passing over our heads.

And it didn't end anywhere close to quickly, either. I pushed my tension out through my nose and slid my arms around his shoulders, feeling this staggering, mortifying need to touch more than just his mouth, to not _let_ this end anywhere close to quickly. For God knows how long, we stood there tangled up in each other, making out like a couple of idiots who might always have been in love.

It had to end, though, eventually, and when it did we both stumbled back breathless, looking at anything but each other. "So you're coming with me," he said.

"Yeah."


	73. The Golden Age

Well, this is the last chapter of _Keyword: Destiny. _Here's hoping it's been a good time for someone other than me. Thanks to everyone who reviewed!

If you're interested in a bit more of this universe, check out _Keyword Destiny: Postscripts_, coming soon to an FF near you. Along the way, I had ideas for little scenes that for one reason or another didn't fit into the main story, but wouldn't leave me alone, so I'm going to post a collection of them as a...well, a postscript to the larger work. It'll be much shorter than this was and considerably more smutty, but you will get some plot with your shameless TAGR porn.

So I'll see you there, and if not...it's been fun!

UPDATE: In the interest of being proactive, I've decided to move Postscripts to AFF. Link is in my profile.

**72. The Golden Age**

_Gaz speaking_

So the loose ends tied themselves up, pretty neatly if you ask me. After Tak got her job back, all of the pieces started falling back into place.

With the help of our newly-avowed allies the Tharlians, the Massive was soon restored and back in action, the Armada steadily filling out around it, and it became our base of operations for the enormous undertaking that was rebuilding the Empire. In the course of a month, Zim had managed to destroy nearly everything Tak had spent twenty-two years constructing; every day he'd spent on her throne meant a month she'd have to work at undoing the damage he had done.

But it was good work, and Tak was happy. Maybe happier than she'd ever been. She had her purpose and her confidence back, and she was thriving on the challenge placed in front of her; at the end of each day, she dropped into bed exhausted and satisfied.

For my part, I was happy, too. I got my fleet back, chewed them out good, and got started whipping them back into shape, with a little workout called Crush Fucking Everyone Who Didn't Hook Up With the Tharlians. We may have been indebted to some factions of the resistance, but there were plenty who'd chosen to exploit Zim's train wreck of a reign instead of helping us end it, and it was safe to say their uppance had come.

Tak appointed Vix Coordinator of Human Integration and Affairs, which meant that she would get to fulfill her promise: she was in charge of seeing that we did, in fact, _do_ _great things _for the human race. She and whoever else she requisitioned to help her would be resettling them on a new planet, providing them with housing and all manner of other resources, helping them carve out their niche in Irken society, and making sure our kindness wasn't repaid with a revolt.

She was every bit as busy as her mum and she seemed just as happy, partly because she was making good on her word, partly because she'd taken the liberty of appointing Effa Vice-Coordinator of Human Integration and Affairs. For whatever reason, she was wild about that frowny little pickle.

I wasn't sure just _how_ wild, as I hadn't managed to trick Vix into spilling it, but I figured it didn't matter anymore. They could do whatever they wanted to do, if they had any spare time to do it in, and Tak wouldn't have to worry about another member of my family boning her out of a job.

Speaking of _doing whatever they wanted to do_, my brother had done us all the favor of disappearing with Zim after Tak passed her judgment, and everyone who'd seen or heard about them sucking face outside Zim's cruiser on Sresh knew why. Which was fine, if nauseating to picture. They'd already done as much damage as they could in that vein, and if they'd keep each other busy getting busy, so much the better for everyone else. I was just glad they'd taken their business elsewhere.

J4 had departed from the Massive, naturally accompanied by PI, thanking us for everything but intending to strike out on her own. They were going to see the universe, she said, and if that was true then I didn't expect to see them again for awhile. There was, after all, a lot in the universe to see.

I figured it would be good for her, for both of them. Vix would miss her, but she wasn't exactly hanging around the Massive all the time anyway; they both had bigger and better things ahead of them.

Of course, without Vix or J4 around, the Massive was emptier than it had been in a long time. It was just us, Mimi, Rel and the rest of the crew, seemingly back at square one.

One day, a little ways into the golden age she'd determined to usher in, I came to the bridge while Tak was working. She was talking with the crew in the ring, discussing some sort of diagram displayed on the viewscreen. When I popped a cup of soda into her hand, it took her a minute to realize I wasn't a service drone.

"What do you want?" she interrupted herself to ask me, waving a hand to silence the crew. First, she glanced up at me, then down at the soda, then back up at the other cup I was still holding. "What's this?"

"Rock salt. It's soda, dumbass—what does it look like?" I wedged myself into the lounger beside her, slinging an arm around her shoulders and my legs over her lap. "I'd have brought champagne," I added, kissing the crease in her brow, "but I kind of doubt you've got any."

"Uh-huh." She frowned suspiciously at the cup in her hand, looking as if she thought it might be rigged to explode. "And what would the occasion be?"

"Oh, nothing big. I was just thinking about it the other night – you know, doing the math – and I realized today's our silver anniversary. Twenty-five years." In the absence of flutes to clink, I tapped my cup against hers, and took a slurp of soda. "Since we got together, anyway. I never did get you into that wedding dress."

"I see," she said, blinking at her cup. "I suppose that _is_ something to celebrate."

"Well, don't sound so overjoyed about it."

"Don't act offended, child. I'm simply…processing the information." As she sipped her soda, a smile crept onto her face, accompanied by a snort when she released the straw. "Humans. Would you be hurt if I confessed to being amused that you find twenty-five years such a significant length of time – so significant, in fact, that it should be assigned a precious metal?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You're so ancient you read Methuselah bedtime stories, and my human perception of time seems pathetic to you. But you can't sit there and tell me that twenty-five years is an _in_significant amount of time, even to you."

Her eyelids dropped to half-mast, making no secret of how unimpressed she was. "I spent twice that time just hunting down Zim."

"Well,_ I_ think it's significant," I said, giving up. "I mean, I'm technically in my forties now. I'm fucking _old_!"

"Are you? You don't look it."

I raised an eyebrow. "Should I thank you, or were you complimenting yourself?"

"You might thank me either way, just to be sure."

I didn't thank her, but I did laugh, and kiss her again, and snuggle closer to her in the lounger, resting my head on her shoulder. It was kind of schmaltzy, but given the occasion, I couldn't help getting nostalgic – looking back on everything that had led us here, and how quickly it had all seemed to go by. I didn't feel like someone whose life would've been half-over, if it weren't for Tak's bio-booster. It didn't feel like twenty-five years had passed.

Most of the time, it still felt like just yesterday, we'd been circling each other in the lemon factory, chatting on my bed, wrapped in blankets on my roof. Lots of mornings, I woke almost expecting to see Tak having a mini meltdown over how her legs were suddenly too long for her leggings (until she saw I was awake, of course, and put on her poker face), or to hear Vix bawling from her crib in the other room.

"Besides," I added after a short period of silence, during which we both sucked on our soda-straws and let our thoughts drift, "I sure as hell never thought I'd end up here."

"Where?" she said dryly. "On the Irken flagship, sipping soda with the Almighty Tallest? You don't say."

"No, having a twenty-fifth anniversary," I corrected her, lifting my head. "With anyone. Seriously – before you, I'd never been with anyone for more than a month, let alone a year. I couldn't even have imagined a person I'd want to stick with for twenty-five."

"Yes, well. I pride myself on being unimaginable."

"Unimaginably stubborn is more like it. You're really killing my buzz here, Sticky."

I grinned as I wrapped the swirl in one of her antennae around my index finger, leaning in to say softly, "I guess tonight, I'll just have to _make_ you remember how grateful you are to have me around. Or hey, what the hell, it's a special occasion – you look like you could use a reminder right now."

The blood rushed to her cheeks and she made a half-hearted attempt to shove me off of her, glancing around to see if the crew had heard. It never stopped being funny, how embarrassed she got when I made even the most veiled of references to the fact that I was routinely getting under her gown. Unless their headsets were selectively noise-canceling, I felt sure that for all Tak's efforts at secrecy, the bridge crew could probably outline one of our evenings from memory by now.

"It's not a question of _gratitude_," she muttered when she'd calmed down a little, her gaze gravitating towards the floor. "If I didn't want you around, you wouldn't be here. I'm just uncomfortable with all of this ritualized sentimentality. My feelings for you aren't any different today than they were yesterday or they will be tomorrow, so why should I treat you differently?

"Moreover," she sniffed, "I despise nostalgia. I can't think of a more pointless way to waste one's time."

"Oh, it's not _completely_ pointless. I'm not one to sit around getting weepy over photo albums, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to kill you to look back for a minute with me."

"You don't know that," she grumbled.

"Just shut up and let me think for a second, would you?" After considering it a moment, all the while gently winding and unwinding the spiral of her antenna around my finger, I flashed her a small smile. "How about this: if you could go back in time twenty-five years and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?"

"That's not impossible, you know," she informed me. "You say it as if it is, but in another twenty-five years – by the time we've reached our plasma anniversary, or whatever extraneous substance denotes fifty years – it won't be. Research suggests—"

"—that you're changing the subject?"

She stopped, pulling a scowl, but I just tilted my head and looked at her expectantly. A few seconds' thought later, she sighed. "I don't _know_, child. Honestly, I'd probably have a brain aneurysm just seeing myself looking like this, so I doubt it would matter what I said."

She sort of huffed as she settled back into the lounger, setting her soda on a hoverdisc beside it. "I don't suppose _you've _given it any serious thought?"

"Not per se. There are a lot of things I wish I'd known twenty-five years ago, but the problem with that is that if I had, things might not be the same now. And I have to say I'm liking the way things are now." I reached down to lace my fingers with hers, smoothing my thumb over her knuckles under her glove.

"I guess if I told myself anything," I decided, "it would be that life rarely goes how you expect it to."

Tak didn't respond right away, and in the momentary silence I found myself thinking about her hand. I looked down at her fingers, intertwined with mine – somewhat awkwardly, since she had fewer fingers than I did – and thought, weirdly enough, of an avocado: black rind with green flesh inside.

I thought about how few people ever saw the skin under her gloves. Unlike me, she'd sooner have died than let herself be seen outside our bedroom in anything less than her gown and all its trimmings, so it was only me, Mimi, and maybe Vix (well, and Nine, I guess, but she didn't really count) who'd had the privilege of actually seeing her hands.

And it suddenly _felt _like a privilege, strange as that sounds. Suddenly, inexplicably (and so long as we're getting sappy, sentimentally), I felt that there was nothing in the universe so beautiful as her ungloved, inside-of-an-avocado-colored hands.

"I suppose," she finally said, with the faintest flicker of a smile, "that's what I would say, too."

I kissed her, drained my soda, and let her have her lounger back, getting to my feet and heading off the bridge. I could've sat there all day, reminiscing, antagonizing Tak, hoping for another sincere smile, but I figured breaktime was about over. There was, after all, still a lot to do.


End file.
